“I can’t understand why men make all this fuss about Everest – it’s only a mountain,” Junko Tabei once said. Fifty years ago today, on 16 May 1975 at 12.30 p.m. local time, the Japanese woman became the first woman to reach the highest point on earth at 8,849 meters. She was accompanied by Ang Tshering Sherpa (1949-2012), both using bottled oxygen. It was around two decades before commercial mountaineering on Mount Everest as we know it today took off.
“I did not want to climb a single step. Never again,” Junko later said about the moment she reached the summit with Ang Tshering. They stayed at the top for 50 minutes, then set off on their descent. Back home in Japan, Tabei was later celebrated as a hero, which she could do little with: “I’ve only done what I wanted.”
Climbing ladies
A teacher awakened Junko’s love of the mountains. She took the then ten-year-old with her to the 1,916-meter-high Nasu-dake volcano. When Tabei wanted to join a mountaineering group in her early 20s, she clearly felt the reservations of the exclusively male members. Nobody wanted to climb with the petite Junko, who was only 1.52 meters tall. In 1969, she had had enough and founded the Ladies Climbing Club Japan (LCC). Their goal: “Let us go on an overseas expedition by ourselves!”
One year later, the time had come. In May 1970, Tabei – with her female compatriot Hiroko Hirakawa and the Nepalese Pasang Nima Sherpa and Girmi Tenzing Sherpa – scaled the 7,555-meter-high Annapurna III. It was only the second summit success on this mountain in western Nepal after the first ascent in 1961.
“I want to come again to Nepal on higher peak, 8000m peak – Everest even,” Junko subsequently wrote in her report for Elizabeth Hawley, founder of the mountaineering chronicle Himalayan Database. At that time, the Nepalese government only issued climbing permits for one Everest expedition per season. The LCC applied for spring 1975 and got the permit.
Rescued from an avalanche
When Junko Tabei traveled to Nepal in 1975, she was already the mother of a three-year-old daughter (she later had another son). The Japanese group consisted of 15 women. The expedition was sponsored by a Japanese television station and a newspaper. The United Nations had proclaimed 1975 the “International Year of Women”, so the women’s expedition fitted in well. It almost ended in disaster.
On 4 May, the Japanese women’s high camp at 6,300 meters above the Khumbu Icefall was hit by an avalanche. “Now it’s over, now I have to die,” Tabei later recalled what she had thought at that moment. She could barely breathe and lost consciousness for a few minutes. The Sherpas eventually managed to free all the team members from the masses of snow.
Died of cancer
Twelve days later, the then 35-year-old Junko Tabei stood on the world’s highest peak. In 1992, she also became the first woman to climb the Seven Summits, the highest mountains on all continents. In 1996, the Japanese summited her second eight-thousander, the 8,188-meter-high Cho Oyu – without bottled oxygen. In 2016, this pioneer of women’s mountaineering died of cancer at the age of 77.
Before the start of the current spring season on Mount Everest, 870 women had scaled the highest of all mountains. Junko Tabei was the first.
