Junko Tabei Dead: First Woman To Scale Mt. Everest Dies Aged 77


Junko Tabei, the first woman to climb Mount Everest more than four decades ago, has died. According to CNN, Ms. Tabei also who went on to scale the “Seven Summits” — the tallest mountain peaks of each of the seven continents — lost her long battle against cancer. While Ms.Tabei had passed away on October 21, the news of her death has only been made public a few hours ago. Initial reports say that Tabei passed away on Thursday at a hospital outside of Tokyo at the age of 77 — 41 years after she climbed Mount Everest.

Junko Tabei shot to international fame back in 1975 when she became the first woman to climb Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. She was 35-years-old at the time of her achievement. What made Tabei’s successful attempt even more noteworthy was the fact that the task was considered almost impossible for a woman to achieve. She was also noted for breaking the stereotype of the typical Japanese women of the 70s who were at that point of time expected to stay at home and perform domestic duties.

Junko Tabei was the fifth of seven children born to her parents. A resident of the town of Miharu in the Fukushima prefecture, she was considered a frail, weak child. Tabei however, showed a keen interest in mountaineering since her childhood and had by the age of 10 already started climbing. Despite her keen interest, she was unable to pursue her hobby full-time because, at that time, it was an expensive affair to become a mountaineer. Odds were also stacked up against her owing to the fact that she was a woman.

Tabei’s second tryst with mountaineering began in the year 1958 when she joined the Showa Women’s University to study English literature. There, she was a member of the mountain climbing club – again dominated by men. A woman like Tabei was unwelcome in the club following which she decided to create her own Ladies Climbing Club: Japan (LCC) in 1969 – the first of its kind in Japan. The club’s slogan was “Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves.” With other members of her club, she started climbing the local mountains in Japan — including Mount Fuji. She also went on to scale the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps. By the year 1972, Tabei had become a fairly well-known mountaineer in Japan. Her 1975 expedition to climb Mount Everest had a total of 15 members, mostly working women — including teachers, a computer programmer, and a juvenile counselor.

“There was never a question in my mind that I wanted to climb that mountain, no matter what other people said,” she told the Japan Times soon after she climbed Mount Everest.

Before Mount Everest, they had also climbed Annapurna III on May 19, 1970.

Tabei had in several subsequent interviews told reporters that her ultimate goal was to climb the highest peaks in 190 countries throughout her life. She was fairly successful in that regard as well and was active in the mountaineering space until 2011 – the year she was diagnosed with cancer. Tabei’s last climb too happened in the same year when she ascended Japan’s Mt. Fuji with a group of high school students. In 1991, she also became the first woman to scale all the seven summits.

Apart from mountaineering, Tabei was also keen to work on ecological concerns – even going to the extent of completing a post-graduate course on the environmental degradation of Mount Everest. She also served as the director of the Himalayan Adventure Trust of Japan, an organization working on a global level to preserve mountain environments. Her organization is known to work to make Mount Everest a trash-free zone.

Tabei married Masanobu Tabei, a fellow climber she met while climbing in Japan in 1965, and had a daughter and a son.

[Featured Image by Binod Joshi/AP Images]

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