Junko Tabei

Chelsea

As a girl growing up in Japan in the 1950s, Junko Tabei was small and fragile for her age. But she developed an interest in a physically and mentally challenging pursuit: mountain climbing. When she was ten years old, her elementary school class took a trip to Mount Nasu, a volcanic mountain in Nikkō National Park. She would later reflect that when she was on top of the mountain, she realized not only how much fun she was having but how much of the world she had never encountered. That was the day she decided to climb whenever she could. Throughout high school, she hiked and climbed. While she was a student at Showa Women’s University, she joined a mountaineering club. But when she started to look for a climbing group to join after graduation, she had an unpleasant surprise: Every group was made up almost entirely of men. She struggled to convince her male teammates to take her seriously—they thought she was there to look for a husband.

Still, Junko kept climbing. She supported her hobby by working constantly, editing a scientific journal and giving English and piano lessons. Within a few years, she had climbed all of Japan’s highest mountains. That was when Junko’s dream of going to the Himalayas with an all-female team first took root. In 1969, she helped found the Joshi-Tohan, or the Ladies’ Climbing Club. Their excellent—and straightforward—motto was: “Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves.” At a time when women in Japan were expected to stay home with their families, or at least stick to secretarial work, their efforts raised more than a few eyebrows.

In 1960s Japan, for any club to be permitted to climb in the Himalayas, it had to be registered as part of the Japan Mountaineering Association and receive the group’s endorsement. Initially, Junko’s Ladies’ Climbing Club was refused membership. They kept applying and eventually became the first women’s club accepted. The Ladies’ Climbing Club’s inaugural trip to the Himalayas was the 1970 expedition to Annapurna, in Nepal. The climb had been completed only once before and never by a group of women. Tabei and her team made it, forging a new path up the mountain’s south side.

When Junko and the other club members decided to try Everest next, the overwhelming view of men in the climbing community in Japan, and likely outside it, was that an all-women’s expedition would never make it to the top of the world. When Junko’s team received a permit for Everest in 1972, they were determined to prove the naysayers wrong. Translating that determination into financing for the Everest expedition proved challenging. Sponsorship from a Japanese newspaper and television station provided only part of the needed funding. Junko financed her portion of the expedition by once again teaching piano lessons. She saved money by making climbing pants from old curtains. Many years later, a reporter from Outside magazine asked her: “Was there a moment before you went to Everest that you wondered if you should quit?” Tabei didn’t beat around the bush: “No,” she answered. “I never thought of giving up once. We had worked so hard to obtain the climbing permit.”

In 1975, Junko and her party set out for the world’s most famous summit. Adding to the already grueling climb was an avalanche that came after midnight, when Junko and her fellow climbers were asleep in a tent at camp. “Without any sign, we were hit by an avalanche, and buried under snow,” she recounted later. “I began to suffocate, and thought about how our accident would be reported. Then suddenly, I was pulled up by Sherpas and revived. It was very lucky that none of us had been injured, but it still took three days until I could walk and move normally.” The doctor at base camp tried to persuade her to return to the bottom of the mountain. Her answer was clear: Absolutely not.

On May 16, 1975, Junko, accompanied by her Sherpa guide, Ang Tsering, became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest. When she reached the top, her first thought was simply: “Oh, I don’t have to climb anymore.” The simple observation about finally ending this particular journey fit Junko’s often repeated approach to climbing: to put one foot in front of the other. She took photos and 8mm movies, made radio calls to base camp, and buried a thermos of coffee at Everest’s peak to mark her ascent.

HILLARY

Since Junko’s triumph, women around the world have followed in her footsteps. One of the most thrilling examples is Ascend Afghanistan, an all-girls’ climbing group. In 2018, Hanifa Yousoufi, a twenty-four-year-old member of the group, became the first Afghan woman to climb Mount Noshaq. She confronted freezing temperatures, gender expectations, and even Taliban attacks. After she made it to the top of the mountain, she explained: “I did this for every single girl. The girls of Afghanistan are strong and will continue to be strong.”

After Everest, Junko did what she always did: She kept putting one foot in front of the other, making her way up mountains. She found that she was just as thrilled at thirty-five years old as she had been at ten by the prospect of seeing things she’d never seen before. The way she saw it, it was straightforward: She loved climbing, and she was still having fun. In 1992, she became the first woman to complete the storied Seven Summits, reaching the peak of the tallest mountain on each continent. At seventy-six, Junko had climbed the highest peaks in seventy-six countries. She didn’t stop climbing until the cancer that finally took her life made it impossible, and that was just a few months before she died.

Junko’s dedication to her sport didn’t end when she was at lower elevation. She advocated for climbers to respect their natural environments and to clean up after themselves. She was a vocal supporter of limiting climbing permits on Everest so that the mountain didn’t take more stress than it could reasonably endure. She worried—rightly—about mounting trash, water quality issues, and growing deforestation as more climbers tried to make it to the top or even to Everest base camp without the ecologically minded ethos of not leaving a trace. She told an interviewer toward the end of her life that she would tell her younger self, “Do not give up. Keep on your quest.” She never gave up—not on climbing, and not on her faith that humanity could find a way to conquer the natural world’s challenges without harming it.