The Japanese Women's Everest Expedition

Junko Tabei · 1975 CE · Earth

The Japanese Women's Everest Expedition — Junko Tabei · 1975 CE · Earth — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Put a woman on the summit of Everest by the South Col route of 1953, with a fifteen-member team of Japanese women from Junko Tabei's Joshi-Tohan club and their Sherpas.

Historical context

Twenty-two years after Hillary and Tenzing, thirty-eight men had stood on top of Everest, by the American Alpine Journal's count, and no woman had. In the Japan of the 1970s, Tabei recalled, men were expected to work outside and women to stay at home, and the women who wanted Everest were told they should be raising children instead. The Joshi-Tohan, the women's climbing club she had founded in 1969, found its money at the last minute and put a fifteen-member team on the South Col route in the spring of 1975, with Sherpas carrying and climbing beside it. A Chinese expedition was on the north side the same season, and its deputy leader, the Tibetan climber Phanthog, reached the summit eleven days after Tabei.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Fifteen women in Kathmandu

    1975 CE

    In 1975 the Japanese Women's Everest Expedition sets out from Kathmandu for the South Col route: fifteen members, led by Eiko Hisano. Among them is Junko Tabei, thirty-five, the mother of a three-year-old child.

  2. Namche Bazaar

    1975 CE

    The way in runs east from Kathmandu and north up the valley of the Dudh Kosi into the Khumbu, the Sherpas' country, by its market village of Namche Bazaar. With the fifteen women go their Sherpas, among them Ang Tsering, who will climb with Tabei to the summit.

  3. Base camp

    16 March 1975

    On 16 March 1975, the American Alpine Journal reports, base camp is set up at the foot of the Khumbu Icefall. Through April the route goes up the icefall and the Western Cwm, and by 2 May the reconnaissance has come close to the South Col.

  4. The avalanche at Camp II

    4 May 1975

    On 4 May an avalanche strikes Camp II, at about 6,300 metres in the Western Cwm, and nearly ends the expedition: seven of the Japanese, Junko Tabei among them, and six Sherpas are injured.

  5. The South Col

    13 May 1975

    The American Alpine Journal puts Camp V on the South Col, at about 7,900 metres, on 13 May, Camp VI at 27,900 feet, about 8,500 metres, the next day, and bad weather on the 15th; the bulletins of Nepal's foreign ministry put Camp V on 14 May and Camp VI on 15 May, and on 13 May named the summit party as Tabei and Watanabe with the sirdar Ang Tsering.

  6. The first woman on Everest

    16 May 1975

    At 12:30 p.m. Nepal time on 16 May 1975 Junko Tabei and Ang Tsering reach the summit of Everest; she is the first woman on the highest point on Earth, twenty-two years after Hillary and Tenzing.

Outcome

Junko Tabei on the summit at 12:30 p.m. on 16 May 1975 with the Sherpa Ang Tsering, twelve days after an avalanche at Camp II injured her, six of her teammates and six Sherpas; the first woman on the highest point on Earth. Eleven days later Phanthog of the Chinese expedition reached the top from the north.

Junko Tabei

A climber from Fukushima who founded a women's climbing club, was hurt in an avalanche at about 6,300 metres and twelve days later, on 16 May 1975, became the first woman on the summit of Everest.

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