by Junko Tabei
I had returned home from Miharu to an urgent telegram that read: “Sasou is missing in Tanigawa-dake. Come as soon as possible.” Masanobu and I lost no time changing clothes, packing ropes and climbing gear, calling all our climbing friends, and leaving for Tanigawa-dake. It was the responsibility of each climbing club to help rescue its own members in the event of an accident. The club would assist the professional rescue team, an offshoot of the police department. By the time we arrived at Doai Mountain Centre, Sasou’s mother was already there. Sasou had not yet been found. Masanobu went straight to the rock wall, and I waited with her mother.
“You know, it’s Sasou, a good climber; she must have bivouacked somewhere. She’s the kind of person who can easily spend a night or two out on her own.” Hopeful comments like these were spoken amongst the group as we waited, but it caused me angst, and I was unsure of what to do, what to think. I would have felt better if had I gone with Masanobu, but I dared not risk slowing them down as they sped to the area where Sasou had fallen. So, I waited at the rescue centre and catered to colleagues and friends of Sasou who arrived burdened with concern for her.
More than six hours later, we were informed that Sasou’s body had been found and that our friend was dead. It was Koichi Yoko-o who found her, jammed tight like a wedge, face down, between two rocks in the upper part of the Third Runse. Yoko-o was terribly distraught as his relationship with Sasou had become strained earlier that year at a summer climbing camp when a mutual friend, Ito, died in a fall. Yoko-o was Ito’s climbing partner and Sasou was camp leader; both parties took responsibility for the accident at the expense of their own friendship. At news of Sasou’s accident, Yoko-o was quickest to the scene in hopes of rescuing her and ending past bygones.
Sasou looked unusually small when her body was carried down the mountain in a yellow sleeping bag, surrounded by leaves turning to the shades of autumn. Against the white rock slab, an array of colourful ropes was tied to lower her body. Saying goodbye to the many rock routes she had poured her passion into – Cup Rock, Tsuitate-iwa, Back Wall, Takizawa Slab – Sasou made her final descent, quietly embraced by the silent prayers of her many climber friends. I could still hear her cheerful voice saying, “Hurry up, let’s go!”
Sasou’s mother and brother were waiting at Doai. I lacked the words to express my sadness, anger and pain when I saw her mother look at Sasou still tied in the climbing rope. “You must have been so cold…” her mother said as she touched her daughter’s face and combed Sasou’s hair, which was matted with blood. Later, as we dressed Sasou in her favourite navy blue kasuri kimono with a bright yellow sash, we noticed that her bones were broken throughout.
As I helped prepare Sasou’s body, I noted that only forty-nine days had passed since she and I had put a kimono on Ito, the friend who had died in the earlier climbing accident. I was shaken to the core with loss. I brushed Sasou’s lips with lipstick, placed her hands together on her chest and shook her hand for the last time. Her face was calm, as always.
She was put into a coffin with the flowers and chocolates that she loved, surrounded by the beauty of trees, rocks and creeks, and the sadness of tears. We said farewell at the crematorium in Numata, at the foot of the mountains. When I saw the blue-white smoke rise into the sky, I began to cry inconsolably, like a waterfall, my mind churning: why Sasou-san? My climbing partner, at thirty-one years of age, was gone.
Although I had experienced grief for my sister and father, Sasou’s death came as a shock to me. She was a person I spoke with every day to make plans to climb, and her voice stayed with me long after she died. I can still picture how she glanced upwards from her shyly tilted head as she spoke gruffly to men.
When Ito died at the summer climbing camp, Sasou could not rid herself of responsibility. We spoke many times about that accident, especially with it being the first fatality for our club. Sasou was extremely exhausted from the stress of the incident, so we decided to take a break together and go on a driving trip around the Tohoku area to gain some mental clarity.
Our plan was to travel to Sendai, then Matsushima via the scenic coastline of Rikuchu-kaigan, and to Aomori, Akita and Niigata before heading home. En route we camped at the seaside, barbecued the fish we caught and played on the beach, but it was not enough to put Sasou at peace. The thick coastal fog gave a spooky feel to the place, and at times I watched her stare into the horizon. She was as unmoving as the Sanzuno-kawa of Osorezan, an imaginary river in Buddhism that represents the in-between of this world and the afterlife. Sasou stood there in her usual style of short pants and a scarf on her head, looking lonely and serious. I was unable to reach her. The sight of my friend that way, and comments she made like, “My life may be done in its thirties anyway,” left a sorrowful impression on my mind, yet I never once thought she would succumb to a fatal accident so soon afterwards.
Sasou’s death made me face the reality that everyone, including me, would eventually die and return to the soil of the earth. I become contemplative, questioning if I was fully living the life I wanted. Simultaneously, I felt such confusion and disappointment that the world around me could continue in its day-to-day manner, business as usual. There was only one solution for me: I had to embrace the sadness and emptiness in my heart and begin to climb again.
Life Continues
“What does a climber think in mid-air as they fall?” I asked Masanobu.
“Suddenly your body is afloat and you see the sky, and then you see the wall coming at you. You realize you’ll crash into it unless you do something, and you panic, looking for anything to grab onto. It feels like quite a long time passes while you are actually falling,” he said. He had fallen once, having been pulled off by a second climber on the Third Slab.
I appreciated his honesty, and I wondered if Sasou had felt the same way as she fell. Since her death, I climbed more with my husband.
In those years of climbing, people spoke mainly of first ascents on a wall or in the winter season, but the Himalayas remained largely undiscussed. Climbing there was only a dream or a story in a book. One day, however, Yoko-o visited us in Shiinamachi, asking Masanobu to join him to climb in Europe the coming summer. Yoko-o would be the trip leader, with the goal of climbing the North Faces of the three big walls – the Grandes Jorasses, the Eiger and the Matterhorn – in one season. Masanobu had never climbed outside of Japan in all his life. I was thrilled at this opportunity for him, and knowing I would slow them down if I joined them, I wholeheartedly encouraged the male-only expedition.
Masanobu and I both had jobs, so we knew we could afford the trip, and by luck, Honda, the company he worked for and that we had assumed was strict, agreed to more than a month’s holiday. I was elated, as my approach was one of not worrying about the loss of a job or missing out on a promotion – I felt it was more important to live a life we would never regret. In that instance, Masanobu had the benefit of both, the dream climbing trip and keeping his job.
In June 1969, three of them, Masanobu, Yoshimura and Yoko-o, left Yokohama, southwest of Tokyo, on a ship to Nakhodka, in the very western part of the former Soviet Union. A fourth member, Noguchi, would join the party later. It had been about a year since Sasou’s death, and as I bid farewell to the ship leaving the harbour, I recalled her words when we bivouacked at the top of a route in Japan’s Northern Alps: “Let’s go climb K2 if we ever go to the Himalayas.” Even then, I could hardly imagine myself on a mountain overseas.
“We’ve been waiting for good weather at the Eiger for ten days, but it’s not happening, so we’ll try the North Face of the Grandes Jorasses first.” That was the first communication I received from Masanobu on their trip. Shortly after, the second telegram arrived: “We did it!” Since I had no doubt of their potential success from the start, I felt more satisfied than overjoyed about their news. Then the next update arrived. They had also climbed the North Face of the Matterhorn but were caught in a snowstorm and had to bivouac on the route. Masanobu’s toes were frostbitten
and he was admitted to hospital as soon as they finished their descent. In his letter, he sounded almost happy, as if he was staying in a fancy hotel with great food. In comparison to the cold and uncomfortable night on the mountain face, maybe that was the case, but he was yet to inform me of his condition, or his plans for coming home. What was I to think?
Another ten days passed before I finally received a telegram that stated he was on his way back to Japan by airplane. I had no idea what to expect when I went to meet him at the Haneda Airport. I watched Masanobu step off the plane and relief washed over me. Though his toes were bandaged, my husband could walk. He seemed more excited about the first-class seat he had flown in and the luxury of the Swiss hospital than the joy I expressed at seeing him standing upright. But once we were settled in our tiny home, and I asked to see how badly damaged his toes were, the truth surfaced. His account made me cringe: “We were caught in a snow storm on the North Face of the Matterhorn and stuck on the wall for two full days. I was worried about getting frostbite since there was no space in the bivy sac for my feet. The ledge was small, and Noguchi and I had to sit with our legs dangling over the edge. Noguchi also suffered from frostbite on his toes, and we were together in the hospital. He’s supposed to come back in three days. We had injections and intravenous. To be honest, it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
He removed the bandage and showed me his toes. A third of two of his toes were black, and his big toes and middle toes were shrunken. “It doesn’t look good,” I thought. There was no doubt in my mind that we had to see a doctor the next day. Frostbite was a rare condition in Japan back then, and we had no idea which hospital would be best to care for Masanobu. We first tried the hospital close to our apartment, but the doctor said he knew nothing about treating frostbite. We ended up at the university hospital near my office, where Masanobu was immediately admitted.
Home alone, I wrote in my diary for consolation: “September 22, it’s my birthday and my husband is in the hospital. I’m so busy and exhausted. It was only Sasou whom I could talk to in hard times. Today, instead, we’re having the memorial climb for the first anniversary since her death at Tanigawa. We always walked together along the paved trail to Ichinokura-sawa. I can still see us walking there when I close my eyes. Sasou-san, I’m so tired. I feel sad and lonely to my core, not having someone to talk to, and for not having my good climbing partner.”
By autumn, Masanobu accepted that his toes were to be amputated at the second joint. There was no other choice despite the efforts made to save them. I tried to cheer him up. “It’ll be just fine. You’ll still be able to walk after,” I said, but I could feel his uncertainty. Noguchi was admitted to the same hospital when he arrived back to Japan, and sadly, he also lost his toes. Five for him, four for Masanobu.
The surgery sites were wrapped and tucked with skin that used to cover bone. Although the stitched areas recovered well, the doctor explained that it would take a long time for the wounds to toughen up. So, to and from our local public bath house, Masanobu wore geta, wooden sandals like flip flops with a middle and back heel, to challenge his balance. A month after the amputations, ready to try more, he was out there on a training hike to Futago-yama. The daytrip was difficult, he said, especially on the descent as the tender joints touched the front of his boots. Noguchi also spoke of how his socks were stained with blood when he first tried to hike. These trials marked the true beginning of their recovery.
I was not in the position to say anything to Masanobu as I knew he was suffering from the fact that he lost his toes due to his own mistake. All I could do was remain positive and encourage him back to health with rehabilitation and training, to be as strong and able as he was before the incident. His family remained quiet, too, and the silence became harder for him than the expected fuss over what had happened.
One day, he suddenly announced that we should buy a piece of land and build a house. Although my first choice was to not live in a one-room apartment for the rest of my life, I had never dreamed of buying land. Neither Masanobu nor I earned that sort of money. At the same time, the thought of having our own castle sooner rather than later was nice. I could suddenly imagine myself playing koto and enjoying the scent of flowers in a room that overlooked a yard full of osmanthus, roses and daffodils in bloom.
Masanobu presented his case to convince me about the land. He explained that although he no longer had the same physical base to stand on, having lost several toes, he believed that owning a piece of real estate would provide the base we needed to move forward in our life, that it would put us in a good position for the future. He planned to borrow money from Honda for a down payment. The selling point for me was how such a purchase would finally put my mother’s mind to rest about my stability with Masanobu.
We began to spend Sundays searching different areas of Tokyo for possible locations to buy land. In doing so, we realized that it was the first time we had travelled by train on a Sunday for anything other than climbing. We had one requirement for our purchase: it had to be easy to reach. In hindsight, we should have considered other factors like the surrounding environment, schools, hospitals and various other facilities, not to mention the availability of a sewage system. In truth, we could not afford anything near a train station that had a sewage system in place and offered a little bit of space. Everything that fell into our budget was too small, so we shifted our mindset to that of hikers – we could walk any distance to a train station. The world of real estate suddenly opened, and we could buy a moderate-sized lot in the middle of a silvery grass field. We were land owners.
Our new acreage was a mile from the nearest train station, and we were a bit skeptical of how we could live there with not much else nearby. Rather than being happy about our decision, we became slightly nervous. Also, we only had enough money to buy the lot, which alone extended our comfort level in affordability – building a house would have to wait. And there was climbing. Despite all our savings and bonuses and any extra money we could scrounge being put towards the land purchase, we never gave up climbing. To us, climbing remained central to our life together and no land or house would be worth pushing that aside.
It was ironic that Masanobu losing his toes to frostbite was the impetus for us to buy a piece of property and ultimately build a house away from the city. Every time we saw the remaining stubs on his feet, we laughed in appreciation: “The purchasing of land all happened because of those toes!” In a sense, our move allowed me to come full circle from country to city and back again, all the while evolving as a climber and nourishing my quest for the mountains.
I had no idea what I was yet to discover about the high places of the world.
CHAPTER 3
Annapurna III
The Annapurna Range in the Himalayas, a 60-kilometre stretch of mountains that runs east–west across north-central Nepal, is a gateway to expedition climbing. The massif’s skyline is dotted with more than a dozen 7000-metre giants, including Annapurna I through IV. At 8078 metres, Annapurna I is the tallest of the range, and the tenth tallest in the world, and is well-known as the first-ever successfully climbed 8000-metre peak, by Maurice Herzog from France in 1950.
Annapurna III (7555 metres) has its own history. Also first climbed in 1950, by Captain Manmohan Singh Kohli of India, the mountain saw its second ascent twenty years later, on May 19, 1970, by the Japanese Women’s Annapurna Expedition, led by Eiko Miyazaki as leader and me as assistant leader. We added two firsts to the mountain: a route up the unclimbed South Face, and an ascent by an all-women’s team. Both accomplishments stirred the pot from the start.
Mountaineering expeditions take planning and finances, which for us added up to a lengthy pre-trip process, and big last-minute decisions are best avoided. Yet, a mere two weeks prior to our departure to Nepal, the final nine members of the climbing team were only just being declared. Concern amongst the group had begun to brew a month earlier, so the eleventh-hour timing of the team announcement was no surprise, even though
it had been more than a year since the trip was first proposed. Nevertheless, we were mountaineers driven by a similar single-mindedness to climb. We were focused on the expedition slogan that promised us this: “Go climb the Himalayas, by all means, by women alone.”
Annapurna III Route Map, Japan Women’s Annapurna Expedition, 1970
COURTESY OF TABEI KIKAKU/ LADIES CLIMBING CLUB
I had recently returned to the mountains after having lost Sasou, my dear friend and climbing partner. My husband, facing his own challenges with newly amputated toes, roped up with me more often than usual, and we climbed multiple winter routes on Tanigawa-dake. That same season, I completed multiple mountain traverses and joined several women-only climbing camps with members from the Ryoho Climbing Club. My intensity for climbing was back, and it was then that Yoshiko Wakayama gave me a call.
Wakayama was an important person in the history of female mountaineering. Along with partner Michiko Imai, she made the first female ascent on the North Face of the Matterhorn in 1967, a mountain she later died on during her honeymoon in 1973. It was in 1969 that I made her acquaintance, when she asked me to meet her, along with two others from the Japanese Alpine Club, to discuss a women-only expedition to the Himalayas. She instantly had my complete attention.
The planned get-together would be a meeting of the minds. The two other climbers were Eiko Miyazaki, the Japanese leader of a previous (and first) India–Japan co-mountaineering trip, and Michiko Sekita, an experienced mountaineer who had summitted Huayna Potosi in the Andes, and later, North America’s Denali. Sadly, Sekita was killed in the Japanese Alps in 1976.
I was nervous to introduce myself to these three great women, as I was the only one who had never climbed overseas. And although I was already a member of the Japanese Alpine Club, thanks to a colleague at my workplace, my impression of the club was that it was no place for layperson climbers like me. In retrospect, my club connection and the resulting meeting were the well-fated threshold that pushed me into the world of the Himalayas.