Trailblazer

On May 16, 1975, Junko Ishibashi Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. Tabei only measured 4’9’’ but she was a giant in many ways.

Born in Fukushima, Japan in 1939, Junko Ishibashi’s first mountain climbing experience was on a school trip when she was ten. Although she yearned to do more climbing her family couldn’t fund such an expensive hobby. After completing her studies in English and American literature at Showa Women’s University, Junko joined several men’s climbing clubs. She scaled all of the major mountains in Japan, including Mount Fuji. When she was 27, Ishibashi married fellow mountaineer Masanobu Tabei and the couple had two children.

Displeased by the way she was treated by male climbers, Junko founded the first all-female climbing club in Japan. The club morphed into the Japanese Women’s Everest Expedition (JWEE). Tabei constantly flouted the norms in Japan’s traditional male-dominated society but people were still shocked when she headed to Mt. Everest, leaving her husband to care for their young children.

Junko personally obtained funding from a daily newspaper and Nippon Television but even those sponsors told her that women should be at home raising children. In addition to the corporate funding, all fifteen team members needed to pay 1.5 million yen (US$5,000) to participate in the expedition. Tabei gave piano lessons to help raise her share. To save money, she made much of her own equipment from scratch- she created waterproof gloves out of a car cover and sewed climbing trousers from old curtains (inspired by Maria Von Trapp perhaps?).

Epic Climb
The fifteen intrepid Japanese women followed the same route that Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Nogay had taken on their historic 1953 climb. On May 4,1975 the team was camping at 20,700 ft when an avalanche destroyed their tents. Tabei was knocked unconscious and was buried under the snow. Sherpa guides dug her out but Tabei could barely walk. After recuperating for two days, she resumed the climb. A bout of altitude sickness debilitated the Japanese team and the Sherpa guides. The original plan had been for two women to scale the summit but the remaining Sherpas could only carry enough oxygen bottles for one woman. Tabei was chosen to complete the historic climb.

Despite the team’s meticulous planning, Junko was confronted with an unforeseen hazard as she neared the peak. She encountered a thin, treacherous ridge of ice that had not been mentioned in the accounts of previous expeditions. Junko managed to traverse the ridge sideways and later described it as the most dangerous experience in all her years of climbing. Twelve days after the near-fatal avalanche, Tabei reached the peak with her sherpa guide Ang Tsering. More than 870 women have reached the summit since Junko blazed the trail.

Not content to rest her laurels, in 1980 Junko began her quest to climb the “seven summits”, the highest peaks on each continent. In 1992, she became the first woman to achieve that feat.

Indefatigable
In her “spare” time, Tabei wrote seven books and organized environmental projects to clean up trash left behind by climbers on Everest, which has become an enormous problem due the growing number of people attempting the climb each year

After scaling the seven summits Taibi set a personal goal to climb the highest mountain in every country in the world. She also led and participated in “clean-up” climbs in Japan and the Himalayas alongside her husband and children. Tabei was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2012 but continued with many of her mountaineering activities. In July 2016, despite her advancing illness, she led a youth expedition up Mount Fuji. Junko Taibi succumbed to her illness in 2016 but not before scaling the highest mountain in 70 separate countries.

As the nuns sang in “Sound of Music”, “Climb every …… Oh, forget it. Have a great weekend.

If you are in the Boston area on May 22, I will be hosting the Blue Bunny Book Store’s first ever trivia night. For more information and to reserve a spot at this free event go to:
The Blue Bunny Bookstore Trivia Night Tickets, Thu, May 22, 2025 at 6:30 PM | Eventbrite