Junko Tabei: The 36th Person, and First Woman, Atop Everest
When reporters wanted to celebrate Junko Tabei as the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, she pushed back on the framing itself. She preferred, she said, to be remembered as "the 36th person to summit Everest" — a small correction that captured her entire approach to mountaineering: it was never really about the record.
A Frail Child, Drawn to a Non-Competitive Sport
Tabei was born Junko Ishibashi on September 22, 1939, in Miharu, in Japan's Fukushima prefecture, the fifth of seven children of a printer. Considered physically frail as a child, she discovered mountaineering at age ten on a school climbing trip to Mount Nasu, drawn specifically to the fact that it was not competitive — there was no opponent to beat, only the mountain and the view. Financial constraints limited how often she could climb through high school, but she studied English and American literature at Showa Women's University from 1958 to 1962, originally intending to become a teacher, and used her time there to keep climbing. At 27 she married Masanobu Tabei, a fellow mountaineer she met on a climb of Mount Tanigawa, and the couple later had two children, daughter Noriko and son Shinya, both of whom sometimes joined her on later expeditions and cleanup climbs.
Founding a Club Because the Men's Clubs Wouldn't Take Her Seriously
After graduating, Tabei joined men's mountaineering clubs and encountered persistent skepticism about her motives simply for being a woman in the sport. In 1969 she founded the Joshi-Tohan Club, Japan's first women-only mountaineering organization, with the motto "Let's go on an overseas expedition by ourselves." She funded the club's early activities by working as an editor for the Journal of the Physical Society of Japan and teaching piano on the side. The club's first major expedition, to Annapurna III in Nepal in 1970, succeeded via a new southern route and marked both the first female and first Japanese ascent of the peak.
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The 1975 Japanese Women's Everest Expedition that would make Tabei famous almost never happened for lack of money. Fifteen working women, including two mothers, made up the team, and sponsors reportedly told organizers that women "should be raising children instead" rather than fund an expedition. Last-minute backing from a newspaper and television network kept the trip alive, but Tabei personally contributed 1.5 million yen of her own money, raised through piano teaching, and sewed some of her own gear — waterproof gloves made from her car's seat cover, trousers cut from old curtains.
Buried by an Avalanche, Climbing Again Within Two Days
On May 4, 1975, an avalanche struck the expedition's camp at 6,300 meters, burying Tabei and four teammates. She lost consciousness but was dug out by Sherpa guides; there were no fatalities. Despite injuries that briefly left her barely able to walk, she recovered enough within two days to continue the climb. Altitude sickness later thinned the group's usable oxygen supply, and expedition leader Eiko Hisano chose Tabei for the final summit push. On May 16, 1975, accompanied by Sherpa guide Ang Tsering, Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
The Seven Summits, Quietly Completed
Tabei went on to climb the highest peak on every continent, finishing the set in 1992 with Puncak Jaya in Indonesia and becoming the first woman to complete the Seven Summits. By 2005 she had taken part in 44 all-female expeditions worldwide and climbed at least 70 of the highest peaks in individual countries. After Everest, she deliberately turned down corporate sponsorship, choosing instead to support herself through paid appearances, guided tours, and continued piano and English tutoring — preserving, as she saw it, her independence from commercial obligation. Between 1996 and 2008 she published seven books recounting her climbs and her efforts to balance mountaineering with raising a family.
From Summits to Cleanup Crews
In 2000, in her sixties, Tabei enrolled in postgraduate environmental studies at Kyushu University, focusing on the ecological damage climbers were doing to Everest's slopes through abandoned waste. She directed the Himalayan Adventure Trust of Japan, which built a waste incinerator for climbers, and organized cleanup climbs across Japan and the Himalayas, often bringing her husband and two children along. After Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami, she began organizing annual guided climbs of Mount Fuji for children from the affected region, continuing the program even after a stomach cancer diagnosis in 2012; she led one final youth expedition up Fuji in July 2016, three months before her death.
Why Junko Is Called a Genius
The word applied to Tabei is not intellectual in any conventional sense; her achievement was one of will, resourcefulness and organizational persistence in the face of active discouragement, rather than a cognitive or creative breakthrough. What she is genuinely credited with inventing was a workaround: when institutions and sponsors would not support a woman-led expedition, she built the institution herself, funded it through her own labor, and fabricated equipment from household materials when funding still fell short. That combination of stubbornness and improvisation, sustained across a fifty-year climbing career, is the strongest version of any "genius" claim on her behalf. The honest counter-case is that Everest by 1975 had already been climbed by dozens of men using established routes and support systems; Tabei's technical climb was not more difficult than those that preceded it, and her significance is historical and social — opening the sport to women who followed — rather than a demonstration of unprecedented technical or physical mastery.
Legacy
More than 400 women have since reached Everest's summit, a path Tabei's 1975 climb helped open. She died on October 22, 2016, at age 77, following complications from stomach cancer. A mountain range on Pluto, Tabei Montes, was named in her honor in 2019, Google marked what would have been her 80th birthday with a commemorative Doodle that same year, and a 2025 feature film, Climbing for Life, dramatized her 1975 expedition and later life, opening that year's Tokyo International Film Festival.
