Junko Tabei - First woman to climb Everest, dies at 77

“Back in 1970s Japan, it was still widely considered that men were the ones to work outside and women would stay at home,” said Tabei, who left her then 3-year-old daughter in the hands of her husband, also a mountaineer, and her relatives, when she went on that Everest expedition.

“Even women who had jobs — they were asked just to serve tea. So it was unthinkable for them to be promoted in their workplaces.”
Against such a background, Tabei says few people believed in the possibility of her going on a 15-member, all-women expedition to the Himalayas — and fewer still supported their plan (helped by Japanese media sponsorship) to scale the highest mountain in the world. “We were told we should be raising children instead,” she recalls.

However, the women in the group, of which Tabei was the deputy leader, never gave up, and they prepared for the Everest climb carefully and with lots of planning. She said the team decided on Everest after considering all the world’s 14 mountains (in either the Himalayas or the Karakoram range) more than 8,000 meters high — because they judged it would be a relatively easy climb beyond 8,000 meters. It also helped that they had access to the records of earlier climbers, including ones from Japan.
“There was never a question in my mind that I wanted to climb that mountain, no matter what other people said,” she said with a smile.

Times have changed since then, though. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the Nepalese government, which issues entry permits to Everest, restricted access to one party per route per season. But in the ’90s, that rule was eased and climbers with a variety of climbing expertise began swarming in, lured by the glory and the prestige of scaling the world’s highest mountain.

As a result, climbing Everest became a kind of leisure pursuit, with Sherpas, porters and other professional guides doing all the work for those who could pay, Tabei said. She gripes that some of those are called “Intensive Care Unit” climbers, as they get more than enough life-support from helpers, with Sherpas in front of them and behind and other expedition staff carrying their supplies, gear and oxygen tanks.

“Climbing Everest has become a status symbol, and even a big entertainment,” she says. “People have started competing over the speed with which they’ve made the ascent, whether they climbed to the peak by themselves, and how old they were when they made it to the top. They have boasted how long they could stay on the summit, how long they were free of oxygen tanks, or how they managed to be naked on the peak. There’s been this thinking that you have to do something to get attention.”

Tabei says she is lucky to have climbed the mountain before such stunts became the norm. In her time, mountaineers aimed for Everest simply for the challenges and joys of climbing it.

On a positive note, however, Tabei says Everest has alerted her to environmental issues. She cites as her biggest inspiration the late Sir Edmund Hillary, who was, in 1953 along with Sherpa Tenzing, the first to reach the top of Everest.