Google is celebrating the 80th birthday of Junko Tabei, the first Japanese woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest with a doodle. That is not all, Tabei was also the first woman to climb all the highest peaks in every continent.
Junko Tabei was born in the small town of Miharu, in Fukushima, Japan in the year 1939. She discovered her love for climbing when she was only 10 years old, while on a school trip to Mount Nasu.
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She climbed the Mount Everest in the year 1975 and was the first woman to do so. She, however, was not very happy with this distinction. She preferred to be known as the 36th person to have climbed the highest peak in the world. In an interview, she said, “I did not intend to be the first woman on Everest.”
The animated Google Doodle shows Tabei in her mountain climbing gear, at the top of the 7 peaks that she climbed during her lifetime.
In 1969, Tabei also formed a club, Japan’s first ladies club for the women who loved climbing mountains. This, she did to stand against the thinking that women were supposed to stay indoors and take care of the house and kids. At this point, she had two kids of her own.
It is not just Mount Everest that she has climbed, she reached at the top of, Aconcagua, Denali, Kilimanjaro, Puncak Jaya, Elbrus and Vinson.
In 2012, the history-making mountain climber was diagnosed with peritoneal cancer and later died in a hospital in Kawagoe, Japan on October 20, 2016.