“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.”
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