You can purchase this print here.
I love to go where I’ve never been before.
Junko Tabei (née Ishibashi; 22 September 1939 – 20 October 2016) was a Japanese mountaineer, author, and teacher.
In 1969 Tabei started the first women’s climbing club in Japan, not to emphasize the woman part, but in order to avoiding the annoying men who gave her a hard time in other climbing clubs. The Club embarked on their first expedition in 1970, climbing the Nepalese mountain Annapurna III. They successfully reached the summit using a new route on the south side, achieving the first female and first Japanese ascent of the mountain.
Mountain climbing of this caliber ran counter to the feminine indoctrination required of Japanese women. The climbers in the club had to transform themselves:
“Her job as group leader required asking a lot of questions, but many people in Japan consider this—to admit you don’t know something—a sign of weakness. The image of the woman whose strength is her ability to remain silent is still powerful in Japan.
“When we began the climb we were determined to only show each other our strong sides,” Tabei says. “When you are climbing a mountain, your life depends on the exact opposite. You can’t be reserved and not say what you think or feel.”
Several of the women on the Annapurna III ascent became sick from the altitude. Yet no one wanted to admit to weakness. Tabei was responsible for her fellow climbers, and she needed to know the truth about their conditions and capabilities. “You need to have a relationship where, when you’re climbing, you can say, ‘I need to go slower,’” she says.
Go slow they did, eventually reaching the summit [of Annapurna III] on May 19, 1970. The ascent profoundly changed Tabei. For her, there would be no more slaving into the late hours to prove she was her company’s most loyal worker. No more fears about speaking her mind. No more concerns about what people said behind her back. “If people want to call me ‘that crazy mountain woman,’ that’s O.K.,” she says.” (Robert Horn in Sports Illustrated, April 29, 1996)
She was the first woman to summit Everest, in 1975, as part of a team of women, but for logistical reasons she was the only one who made it to the top. When she got there she didn’t cry out in celebration, she just thought, “Oh, I don’t have to climb any more.” Later she said that she didn’t understand why men made such a big deal out of climbing Everest, it’s just a mountain. Still: “There was never any question in my mind that I wanted to climb that mountain, no matter what other people said.”
Oh, and on that Everest climb her team had been buried in an avalanche. Tabei had been rescued by one of their Sherpas, who pulled her out of the snow by her feet. It was two days before she was well enough to proceed.
She never accepted corporate sponsorship after Mount Everest, preferring to remain financially independent. She saved money to fund her expeditions by working as an editor, making paid public appearances, guiding mountain-climbing tours, and tutoring local children in music and English. Tabei’s friends and supporters sometimes donated food and equipment.
Tabei was instrumental in the movement to clean up the mountain climbing routes which were getting buried with climbers’ trash. This meant organizing expeditions with the sole purpose of cleaning up the environment. Tabei also wrote seven books during her life.
In 1992 she was the first woman to complete the Seven Summits challenge by climbing the highest peak on each of the seven continents: Everest (1975), Kilimanjaro (1980), Mt. Aconcagua (1987), Denali (1988), Mt. Elbrus (1989), Mount Vinson (1991), and Puncak Jaya (1992). By 2005, Tabei had taken part in 44 all-female mountaineering expeditions around the world.
When she died at 77 years old in 2016 she had only stopped climbing for two weeks. Her goal had been to climb the highest peak in every country, even though she had been battling cancer since 2012. She had made it up the highest peak in 76 countries. A google search tells me there are 195 countries. She must have known she would never achieve the goal, but still she kept going.
An astronomer named an asteroid “6897 Tabei” after her and in 2019, a mountain range on Pluto was named “Tabei Montes” in her honor.
SOURCES
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1008036/3/index.htm
You must be logged in to post a comment.