Birth of Junko Tabei

Junko Tabei was born Junko Ishibashi on September 22, 1939, in the small town of Miharu in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. She was the fifth of seven children in a family of modest means during a turbulent period of Japanese history, just before the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific.

As a child, Tabei was considered physically weak and was not expected to excel athletically. Her first encounter with mountains came at age ten, on a school trip to Mount Nasu and Mount Chausu, an experience she later credited with sparking a lifelong passion for climbing, even though she did not have the means to pursue it seriously until adulthood.

Her early life in postwar Japan, a society still recovering from devastation and adhering to strict traditional gender roles, offered few avenues for girls interested in physically demanding, male-dominated pursuits like mountaineering. Despite these constraints, Tabei pursued higher education, eventually studying English and American literature at Showa Women's University in Tokyo, where she also began to seek out climbing clubs and mountaineering communities.

This humble, unlikely beginning set the stage for a woman who would go on to reshape the landscape of international mountaineering and challenge deeply entrenched assumptions about what women could achieve in extreme environments.