Junko Tabei
WHEN Junko and her all-woman Ladies Club team from Japan were ascending Mt. Everest, they were caught in a deadly avalanche. For a few hours, they were buried under snow. Fortunately, some Sherpas found them. Junko could hardly walk for a couple of days but the daring 35-year-old braved it to the summit 12 days later, on 16 May, 1975 with her Sherpa, Ang Tshering.
Junko was born in 1939 in a small agricultural town in Fukushima prefecture. She was drawn to mountaineering from a young age. After obtaining a degree in English and American literature, she joined mountain-climbing clubs. In 1969, she established the Ladies Climbing Club with the motto ‘Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves’.
The group’s first expedition was to scale Annapurna III (7,555 m) in Nepal, where she and her all-woman team succeeded in forging a new path up the south side of the mountain. In 1992, Junko established another record, when she became the first woman to climb the highest peaks on all seven continents, including Kilimanjaro (Tanzania), Denali (Alaska) and Vinson (Antarctica).
The achievement paved the way for women mountaineers to reach for the heights at a time when women were encouraged to stay at home and look after the family.
As chairperson of the Himalayan Adventure Trust of Japan, Junko campaigned for sustainable mountaineering, worked for the upliftment of Sherpas and tried to bring about a greater awareness of the need to preserve the ecology of the mountains in the face of tourism.
In 2012, Junko was diagnosed with cancer. It did not stop her from continuing with her passion for scaling mountains and during an interview, she said, “I am suffering from cancer but I would like to keep going my way and climb mountains.” She passed away in November 2016.
