[1][2][3] Tabei wrote seven books, organized environmental projects to clean up trash left behind by climbers on Everest, and led annual climbs up Mount Fuji for youth affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake.

[2][7] Tabei helped fund her climbing activities by working as an editor for the Journal of the Physical Society of Japan.

They successfully reached the summit using a new route on the south side,[4] achieving the first female and first Japanese ascent of the mountain.

[8] Tabei and one other member, Hiroko Hirakawa, were chosen to complete the final climb to the top, accompanied by two sherpa guides.

Many Joshi-Tohan Club members were initially reluctant to admit they did not know something or needed assistance, preferring to keep a stoic silence, but mountain climbing forced the women to acknowledge their personal limits and accept help from each other.

[2] After Tabei and Hirakawa successfully summited Annapurna III on 19 May 1970,[9] the Joshi-Tohan Club decided to tackle Mount Everest.

[7] She was able to obtain last-minute funding from the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and Nippon Television,[2] but each group member still needed to pay 1.5 million yen (US$5,000).

[5] To save money, Tabei made much of her own equipment from scratch, creating waterproof gloves out of the cover of her car and sewing trousers from old curtains.

[13] The group attracted much media attention with their plans, and the 15 women were initially accompanied by journalists and a television camera crew as they began their climb.

[12] They used the same route to ascend the mountain that Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had taken in 1953,[14] and six sherpa guides assisted the team for the full span of the expedition.

[10] Nearing the peak, Tabei was furious to discover that she would have to cross a thin, hazardous ridge of ice that had gone completely unmentioned in accounts by previous expeditions.

[3] Twelve days after the avalanche, on 16 May 1975, with her sherpa guide Ang Tsering, Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Everest.

She saved money to fund her expeditions by making paid public appearances, guiding mountain-climbing tours, and tutoring local children in music and English.

Tabei was also the director of the Himalayan Adventure Trust of Japan, an organization working at a global level to preserve mountain environments.

Following the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, Tabei began organizing annual guided excursions up Mount Fuji for schoolchildren affected by the disaster.

[19] The theme for naming mountains on Pluto is "Historic pioneers who crossed new horizons in the exploration of the Earth, sea and sky".