Junko Tabei
1939 – 2016 · Japan
Known for: First woman to reach the summit of Everest and to climb the highest peak on every continent
“First woman on the summit of Everest, and content to be simply the thirty sixth person to stand there.”
Biography
Junko Tabei was born Junko Ishibashi on 22 September 1939 in Miharu, in Fukushima Prefecture, the fifth of seven children of a printer. She was thought a frail child, yet at ten a school trip took her up Mount Nasu and she found what would hold her for life: a sport with no opponent and no score, only the mountain and the view from the top. There was no money at home for so expensive a hobby, and she climbed little in her school years. After studying English and American literature at Showa Women's University from 1958 to 1962 she joined the climbing clubs of Tokyo, all of them made up of men. Some accepted her, others asked openly what a woman wanted on a rope. Within a few years she had climbed every major peak in Japan and had married Masanobu Tabei, a climber she met on Mount Tanigawa.
In 1969 Tabei founded the Joshi-Tohan Club, the first women's mountaineering club in Japan, whose motto was that women should go on an overseas expedition by themselves. In May 1970 its first expedition reached the summit of Annapurna III in Nepal by a new route, the first ascent of that mountain by women and by a Japanese party. The club then turned to Everest. Tabei raised money for the Japanese Women's Everest Expedition while being told that its members ought to be raising children instead, taught piano to cover her own share and sewed her climbing trousers from old curtains. On 4 May 1975 an avalanche buried the camp at 6,300 metres and the Sherpa guides dug her out unconscious. Twelve days later, on 16 May, with the guide Ang Tsering beside her, she became the first woman to stand on the summit of Everest.
The attention that followed left her uncomfortable, and she said she would rather be remembered as the thirty sixth person to reach the summit than as the first woman. In 1992 she became the first woman to have climbed the highest mountain on every continent. She wrote seven books and organised projects to clear away the rubbish that expeditions had left on Everest. After the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 she led yearly climbs up Mount Fuji for young people from the affected region, and continued them after she fell ill with cancer. Junko Tabei died on 20 October 2016 at the age of seventy seven. An asteroid, 6897 Tabei, carries her name, and in 2019 a range of mountains on Pluto was named Tabei Montes.