Junko Tabei
- Japan Society of Boston
- Aug 15
- 10 min read
Updated: Aug 20
A trailblazer in the mountaineering world, Junko Tabei accomplished the incredible feat of being the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest and the first woman to complete the Seven Summits, scaling the tallest peaks in the world’s seven continents. Uncomfortable with the fame she received for summiting Everest, Tabei once said she’d rather be remembered as the 36th person to climb the world’s highest peak (Baynes). Another reason for this was she that didn’t want the focus to be on the fact that she was a woman: she climbed mountains because of her love for them, not for any fame or notoriety.
This passion for mountaineering was sparked at an early stage in her life. As the youngest of seven children, Junko Tabei (née Ishibashi) was born in 1939 in Miharu, a small agricultural town in Fukushima Prefecture. With weak lungs, and often coming down with high fevers and pneumonia, she never considered herself as an athlete and others thought of her as a frail child (Kikstra). At the age of 10, a teacher brought her and her class up the Asahi and Chausu peaks in the Nasu mountain range. “I was shocked,” Tabei said. “It wasn’t green.” The volcanic landscape and the freezing temperatures in summer appealed to her, and climbing seemed to suit her physical condition and temperament. “It wasn’t like a competition. Even if you go slow, you can make it to the top, or, if you must, you can quit at the middle” (Horn).
Tabei’s love for mountains continued to grow from there. After graduating from Showa Women’s University in Tokyo with a degree in English and American literature with the intent of becoming a teacher, she instead joined several clubs that were primarily for men (Horn). Joining in on what was a male-dominated hobby, she received mixed reactions from the men in the clubs. "Some of the men wouldn't climb with me, but a few older ones were more supportive," said Tabei. "Some thought I was there to meet men, but I was only interested in climbing” (Horn). As fate would have it, she did meet Masanobu Tabei, a well-known mountaineer, on an excursion on Mount Tanigawa. They married when she was 27 despite her mother’s objections as he wasn’t a college graduate (Horn). They had two children together, a daughter and a son.
However, Tabei’s passion for mountaineering never waived. In 1969, she established the Joshi-Tohan (Women’s Mountaineering Club) with the slogan: “Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves.” After a year, the group felt ready to climb Annapurna III, the third-highest peak of the Annapurna range of the Himalayas. Money and time were an obstacle and Tabei, as group leader, was in charge of logistics even though she’d never been outside Japan (Horn). In the '70s, access was only granted on certain terms. Any club that wished to go to the Himalayas had to be a registered member of the Japan Mountaineering Association (JMA) and receive a recommendation from them. The Joshi-Tohan club was not accepted the first time. However, later they became recognized, which made the Annapurna III expedition possible (Frenette).
While on the climb, Tabei's job as group leader required asking a lot of questions. "When we began the climb, we were determined to only show each other our strong sides," Tabei said. "When you are climbing a mountain, your life depends on the exact opposite. You can't be reserved and not say what you think or feel” (Horn). This proved to be a challenge for the group. Several of the women on the Annapurna III ascent became sick from the altitude and no one wanted to admit to weakness, but Tabei was responsible for her fellow climbers, and she needed to know the truth about their conditions and capabilities. "You need to have a relationship where, when you're climbing, you can say, 'I need to go slower,'" she said (Horn). Despite these challenges, the group reached the summit on May 19th, 1970.
Mount Everest was the next climb the group set their eyes on. Throughout the 1970s and '80s, the Nepalese government, which issues entry permits to Everest, restricted access to one party per route per season, so when Joshi-Tohan was awarded one, their schedule was booked until 1975 (Otake). They used the time to plan and get sponsors to be able to pay for the expedition’s cost, but securing the funding was difficult. When recalling the difficulty in getting sponsors, Tabei stated, “I was told, ‘we can’t be a sponsor to something that is bound to fail.'” Other members weren’t happy about how they were portrayed by the Japanese media: “Newspaper articles liked mocking us. They would use the picture of us applying a lip balm and say ‘even in the mountain, they don’t skip wearing the make-up.’ For a lot of people, it was a joke. They didn’t think we would make it” (JWEE 1975).
The Yomiuri Shimbun and Nihon Television eventually sponsored the expedition last minute. Additionally, one member’s father sold his rice paddy that had been passed down through generations. He did this without hesitation, telling his daughter, “Don’t live life with regrets (JWEE 1975).” The funding didn’t cover all of the costs, so Tabei had to find ways to afford the rest. Some of the ways she saved money was through teaching piano lessons, her climbing pants were cut from old curtains, and she even padded her own sleeping bag and fashioned waterproof gloves from the cover of her car (Padoan). By the time 1975 came around, the Japanese Women’s Everest Expedition consisted of a television crew, three journalists, four cameramen, 23 support climbers, and around 500 porters.
Mt. Everest In Himalayas: Mrs. Junko Tabei (L), 35, the first woman ever to conquer the world's highest peak, stands against the background of the southern wall of Mt. Everest with Nepal's Sirdar Ang Tsering. Some two weeks after the picture was taken near the Second Camp, the two reached the summit of Mt. Everest 5/16.
The expedition began in March of that year with the establishment of Base Camp. Several camps were made as they trekked up the mountain, but their trip wasn't without setbacks. On May 4th, when they were camping around 20,000 ft, Tabei and 14 of her fellow climbers were hit by an avalanche. Pinned down by chunks of ice, she couldn't get up or see—another woman's hair smothered her face—but she did manage to yank a penknife from a cord around her neck and hold it up. A support climber inside the tent grabbed the blade from her as she blacked out. Slashing the fabric and punching through the snow, he summoned help and Tabei was fished out by her ankles (Padoan).
This setback didn’t deter them from continuing their climb up to the summit. It was, however, two days before she could rise on shaky feet and she refused to relinquish her role as the group's climbing leader so she stayed at the front, even though she often had to crawl (Horn). When they neared the summit, a decision had to be made about who was to continue on to the top. Half of the [porters] were suffering altitude sickness and could not carry up enough oxygen bottles to a higher camp for the final ascent team, so eventually Tabei was chosen (Frenette). In the final ascent, an icy knife-edge ridge stood between her and the summit. She was astounded to realize she needed to traverse that ridge, moving sideways with half her body on the Chinese side of the mountain and the other half on the Nepalese side (Chappell). To the Japan Times she recounted how she felt upon seeing the ridge, saying, “I had no idea I would have to face that, even though I'd read all the accounts of previous expeditions. I got so angry at the previous climbers who hadn't warned me about that knife-edge traverse in their expedition records" ((Chappell).
It took 12 days for Tabei and her guide, Ang Tsering, to reach the summit. At last, on May 16th at around 12:30 pm, she clambered on battered hands and knees to a spot she described as "smaller than a tatami mat” (Horn). Exhausted but euphoric, she buried a thermos of coffee in the snow to wake the resident mountain goddess and announce her arrival (Padoan). Junko Tabei had become the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
Photograph of Japanese Junko Tabei, the first women in the world to reach the summit of Mount Everest on 16 May 1975. (Photo by AFP) / Japan OUT (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
Junko Tabei rightfully received a lot of attention for this accomplishment and was even awarded the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu from the then-Kingdom of Nepal that same year. But the attention she received and the responsibility she felt were overwhelming, and she never sought corporate funding again, saying, "If I accept sponsorship, then climbing the mountain is not my own experience. It's like working for the company” (Horn). It was her love for the mountains that fueled her passion to continue.
The Everest Expedition also opened Tabei’s eyes to the environmental issues that the mountains, especially Everest, face. The notoriety and difficulty of Mount Everest attracts many visitors around the world and, with the increase in climbers, came an increase in trash. Regarding South Col, the lowest point of the ridge between the two peaks of Everest and Lhotse, a foreign climbing team had told her it was littered with thousands of oxygen tanks, batteries, and even cassette tapes (Kyodo 17). Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first to reach the top of Everest, was her inspiration on the topic of environmental protection. Alarmed by the severe environmental damage being done to the mountain due to the increase in visitors, Hillary called for a five-year moratorium on Everest expeditions “to give the mountain a rest," but his plea went unheeded due in part to opposition from Nepalis fearing a sudden loss of income (Otake). Instead, he established the Himalayan Adventure Trust for mountain environment conservation in 1989 and Tabei was appointed as its Japanese representative. In 2000, she completed post-graduate studies at Kyushu University researching the amount of waste and refuse accumulating on the mountain since the first expedition in 1923.
The Seven Summits was another achievement of hers that proved her passion for climbing. In 1992, she became the first woman to scale the tallest mountains in the world’s seven continents: Everest (Asia), Aconcagua (South America), Denali (North America), Kilimanjaro (Africa), Elbrus (Europe), Vinson Massif (Antarctica), and Kosciuszko (Australia). When recounting her climb of Vinson Massif, she said:
Vinson Massif was breathtakingly beautiful. The mountains are scattered like perfect pyramids in a vast expanse of pure white snow. The sun never sets at this time of year and the snow sparkles like diamonds above the bright blue ice. I’m not a religious believer, but when you see such beauty, and realize how fortunate you are to be there, you can’t help believing that there must be a God that created the world (Kurtenbach).
In 1999, she successfully climbed five 7,000-meter peaks in the former Soviet Union, becoming the first Japanese woman to receive the Snow Leopard award (Hajime). A year after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, Tabei organized a group to guide affected school children from the area up Mount Fuji. She had said she wanted high school students who are in difficult situations to realize that if they take one step at a time, they will eventually reach the top (The Sankei Shimbun).
Although she was diagnosed with cancer, Tabei still continued climbing. In July 2016, a few months before her death, she summited Mount Oguni in Fukushima, and in July she climbed Mount Fuji with a group of students from the Tohoku region. Mount Fuji ended up being her last climb. Her doctor gave her special permission to make the trip, and she was able to reach an elevation of 3100 meters before her ailing health forced her to turn around (Franz). Survived by her husband Masanobu and their children, she died in October 2016 at the age of 77.
With the many achievements she made in her life, Junko Tabei’s legacy has been cemented in the history books. It took her to new heights and to places many never see. In a fitting way to end her story, she shared how her experiences shaped her:
The mountain teaches me a lot of things. It makes me realize how trivial my personal problems are. It also teaches me that life should not be taken for granted. When I'm exhausted at the end of the day, I'm thankful that I'm at least safe and alive. When my child gets a bad grade on a test, I tell myself it's not a big deal. I don't gripe. I'm able to look at the bigger picture. Climbing has changed my values (Kikstra).
Tabei continued, saying mountaineering has also taught her to become a more humble person and less accustomed to the age of modern technology, in which devices "can be turned on or off with a single switch" and people complain when something breaks down without warning. "Once you're in the mountains, there's no convenience store to run to when you're hungry” (Kikstra).
Works Cited
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Chappell, Bill. “Japanese Climber Junko Tabei, First Woman to Conquer Mount Everest, Dies at 77.” Npr.org, 22 Oct. 2016, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/22/498971169/japanese-climber-junko-tabei-first-woman-to-conquer-mount-everest-dies-at-77. Accessed 15 Aug. 2025.
Frenette, Brad. “A Final Interview with the First Woman to Summit Everest.” Outside Online, 20 Oct. 2017, www.outsideonline.com/2252936/junko-tabei-anniversary. Accessed 15 Aug. 2025.
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Horn, Robert. “NO MOUNTAIN TOO HIGH for HER JUNKO TABEI DEFIED JAPANESE VIEWS of WOMEN to BECOME an EXPERT CLIMBER.” Sports Illustrated Vault | SI.com, 29 Apr. 1996, vault.si.com/vault/1996/04/29/no-mountain-too-high-for-her-junko-tabei-defied-japanese-views-of-women-to-become-an-expert-climber. Accessed 15 Aug. 2025.
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Kurtenbach, Elaine. “Japanese Woman Scales Mountains While Ignoring Society’s Stereotypes.” Los Angeles Times, 31 Mar. 1991, p. 19.
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