Junko Tabei

Junko Tabei preferred to be known as the thirty-sixth person to climb Everest, despite the fact that her achievements — becoming the first woman to summit the world’s tallest peak and the first to climb the Seven Summits — called for more than just remarkable skill and fitness. Tabei faced virulent mid-twentieth-century sexism, defying cultural expectations for women, who at the time, and especially in her home country of Japan, were thought to be little more than homemakers.

Junko Ishibashi was born on September 22, 1939, in Miharu, a small town in Fukushima Prefecture in northern Honshu, the fifth daughter of seven children. Her father was a printer. She wasn’t a hardy child — her family thought of her as frail — but she fell in love with climbing at the age of ten, on a class trip to Mount Nasu, in Nikkō National Park, with her fourth-grade teacher. The mountain made an impression that nothing else in her childhood quite did. “My initial sense was