Junko Tabei

• Born: September 22, 1939
• Birthplace: Miharu, Fukushima, Japan
• Died: October 20, 2016
• Place of death: Kawagoe, Saitama, Japan

Sport: Mountaineering

Early Life

Junko Tabei was born Junko Ishibashi on September 22, 1939, in Miharu Machi, a market town in northern Japan. The fifth of seven children, her’s first taste of mountain climbing came at the age of ten. On a school field trip, Tabei’s teacher guided her and some of her classmates to the top of a 6,000-foot mountain. This experience led to a fascination with mountains and mountaineering that became her passion in the years to come.

The Road to Excellence

After graduating from Tokyo’s Showa Women’s University in 1962, Tabei took a job as a middle-school teacher. She also joined a men’s climbing club. Barely 5 feet tall and weighing 93 pounds, she found that she was nonetheless equal in talent to the male climbers. Subsequently, she climbed several of Japan’s best-known peaks, including its highest mountain, the 12,388-foot Mount Fuji. As her confidence and mountaineering skills grew, her goal became to climb what she termed the “white mountains” throughout the world.

In 1965, she met Masanobu Tabei, a fellow mountaineer. Despite her mother’s objection—Masanobu Tabei was not a college graduate—the two were married three years later. In the years to come, they raised two children: a daughter, Noriko, and a son, Shinya.

In 1969, Tabei established a women’s mountaineering club; in 1970, her club decided to climb 24,787-foot Annapurna III in the Himalayas. The expedition included 8 climbers, 14 sherpas, 114 porters, a doctor, and a reporter. The climbers arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal, in March of that year.

The traditional approach to climbing in the Himalayas is to lay siege to the mountain. That is, over a period of time, climbers—and especially sherpas—set up and stock a series of camps at higher and higher levels. This gradual movement up the mountain allows time for the human body to acclimatize to increasing elevation. Camp one was established at 14,370 feet. This was followed by other camps, culminating with Camp five at 22,300 feet. Tabei, Hiroko Hirakawa, and two sherpas were selected by Eiko Miyazuki, the expedition leader, to make the final assault on the summit from Camp five. After a determined effort, the four reached the top on May 19, 1970.

The Emerging Champion

Following their success on Annapurna III, Miyazuki and Tabei decided to attempt Mount Everest, in the Himalayas, with an all-woman team. In 1971, they received a permit to climb Everest in 1975. Thus began a long period of extensive planning and fundraising. The expedition was sponsored by the mountaineering club, and funds were secured from sources including Yomiuri Shimbun, the Tokyo newspaper, as well as Nikon Television. Also, in 1973, Tabei resigned from her teaching job and used her retirement benefits to help pay for the expedition.

At 29,035 feet, Mount Everest is the highest point on Earth and has long been a target for world-class mountaineers. Despite determined British efforts in the 1920s to climb the mountain, the first confirmed ascent was not made until 1953, by Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper from New Zealand, and by Tenzing Norgay, a Nepalese sherpa. In the intervening years, a number of men had climbed the mountain—but no woman had done so.

The all-woman Japanese Everest expedition involved fourteen women, five hundred porters, twenty-three sherpas, and a doctor. On March 16, 1975, base camp was established at the foot of the Khumbu glacier. It took nearly two weeks to rig a route of aluminum ladders and fixed lines through the treacherous Khumbu ice fall. By April 3, they had established Camp one at the top of the ice fall. Over the following weeks, they established a series of camps higher up the mountain. On May 4, disaster struck. An avalanche rolled over seven climbers and six sherpas asleep in their tents. Two of the sherpas were seriously injured, as was Tabei. It took several days for her to recover.

As a result of the lost time and equipment, only one summit attempt by two climbers could be supported. On May 13, Tabei and sherpa Ang Tshering established Camp six at 27,887 feet. On May 15, the two left for the summit, only to be turned back by bad weather. On May 16, they tried again, leaving camp at 5:00 a.m. Tabei’s 31-pound load included cameras, drinks, flags, and oxygen cylinders. While the mountain has been climbed without using bottled oxygen, most climbers sleep wearing an oxygen mask at high camp and breathe a steady flow of the gas on summit day. At 8:30 a.m. Tabei and Tshering reached the South Summit. With Tshering breaking a trail through deep snow, the pair finally reached the summit of Mount Everest at 12:30 p.m. At thirty-five years of age, Tabei became the first woman to climb Mount Everest and stand on the highest point on the planet.

Continuing the Story

Made famous by her achievement, Tabei continued to climb. In 1992 she became the first woman to complete the “Seven Summits,” the highest points on each of the seven continents. Over the years, Tabei climbed more than seventy major peaks all over the world and received numerous awards. Beginning in 2012, she organized annual climbs of Mount Fuji with groups of high school students. Deeply concerned about the natural environment, she was also directly involved in “cleanup” climbs in both Japan and the Himalayas and became director of the Japanese chapter of the Himalayan Adventure Trust, an organization whose goal is to preserve the mountain environment.

Later in life Tabei was diagnosed with stomach cancer, which eventually impacted her ability to climb. She died at the age of seventy-seven on October 20, 2016, in Japan.

Summary

As a successful woman in the male-dominated sport of mountaineering, Junko Tabei was an inspirational role model for women—and all mountaineers—in Japan and around the world. She followed a dream that took her to the tops of the “white mountains” and to the top of her sport.

Bibliography

Birkett, Bill, and Bill Peascod. Women Climbing: Two Hundred Years of Achievement. London: A & C Black, 1990.

Horn, Robert. “No Mountain Too High for Her.” Sports Illustrated 84, no. 17 (April 29, 1996).

Jordan, Jennifer. Savage Summit: The True Stories of the Five Women Who Climbed K2, the World’s Most Feared Mountain. New York: William Morrow, 2005.

McLoone, Margo, and Kathryn Besio. Women Explorers of the Mountains: Nina Mazuchelli, Fanny Bullock Workman, Mary Vaux Walcott, Gertrude Benham, Junko Tabei. Mankato, Minn.: Capstone Press, 2000.

Roberts, Sam. "Junko Tabei, First Woman to Conquer Everest, Dies at 77." The New York Times, 26 Oct. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/world/asia/junko-tabei-dead.html. Accessed 7 Oct. 2020.