Junko Tabei was the first woman to climb Mount Everest, and the first woman to climb the tallest mountain on each continent.
Her obituary in the Christian Science Monitor observes:
The early climbing achievements of Tabei, a married mother of two, were especially noteworthy at a time when most women were expected to stay home and perform domestic duties.
They are all the more noteworthy considering she was once labeled a “weak child.”
She had the last laugh, though: even after a cancer diagnosis in her seventies, she continued to climb, working toward her goal of scaling the highest peak in every country in the world.
There is a poetic device in Japanese haiku poetry called a kigo, a word or phrase associated with a season. Fittingly, Tabei’s favorite, expressing spring, was “the mountain laughs.”