Do you mean that you don’t feel swept up by a sense of achievement or satisfaction?
Dhaulagiri is a great mountain, and it’s one I’ve wanted to climb for a long time. I’ll tell you, that is one good-looking mountain. Still, as soon as I got there, I wanted to get out of there right away. I think it’s only those that feel that sense of their lives being in danger that are always going to be able to come back down. There is a thing they call “climber’s high.” But I think that if you let the achievement and satisfaction get to you, you put yourself in the dangerous position of not being able to make proper judgments.
At least so far, I haven’t had that. I think that rather than saying that’s what allows me to climb, I’d say that it’s what has allowed me to come back down. If you can’t get back to the base camp, if you don’t get at least back down to there, you won’t make it up the next mountain. Without this repetition of ascent and descent, you can’t reach all fourteen of those peaks. So the way I look at it, the achievement is not in having climbed it, but in having been able to make it back down.

So you see being able to come down alive as a bigger achievement than reaching the top, is that right?
That’s right. You see, I think of mountain climbing as being more of a loop than a simple ascent. At one point on the loop, there is a span of maybe five or ten minutes where you are standing on the summit. It’s difficult for me to think of that brief moment in the middle as the achievement. It’s not the climax, and it’s not even really much of a highlight in terms of the climb as a whole.
I feel like there are bigger loops than that, though, too. If you think of the loop as starting from the conception of the climb, or the desire to climb a given mountain, then it begins with thinking about things like: what should I take? What should I wear? Or: maybe I should make the strap on that axe just a little bit shorter. At that point, the loop has already begun. All kinds of things can happen just on the trip to base camp.
When you start to think about the next mountain you want to climb, you're beginning the next loop. Climbing for me has always been an ongoing cycle like that.
I’ve closed up loop after loop like that, and Dhaulagiri was just closing the loop on the fourteen peaks as a whole. That’s one way I think about it.

What Climbing the Fourteen Peaks Means to Takeuchi

Does completing the summit of all fourteen peaks have a lot of significance?
In terms of records, it’s something that’s been done again and again already. It’s already been 25 years since the Italian climber Reinhold Messner completed his summit of the fourteen peaks in 1986.With nearly thirty people having done it, it’s not that rare or special of a record. I myself have been able to observe some of the other climbers who have done it from a close distance. I didn’t do all of it without oxygen, so as a record, it’s pretty unremarkable.
If Noboru Yamada¹ had been able to do it when he died in 1989, he would have been the third or fourth person in the world to do so. It would have been much more significant to the climbing world for him to do have done it then than it is for me to do it now. But now, with so many people having already accomplished it, I don't really think that my being the first Japanese to do so is anything special. This is something that all humans do, so nationality doesn’t have anything to do with it.
Still, it's true that it’s a really, really special thing to the Japanese. It was a big problem that no Japanese had as yet achieved this record that had long been already achieved by so many others globally, and I thought it was such a shame, I had to do something. Even though it was a Japanese team that first summited Manaslu. I thought it was such a shame that he didn't make it, because he had put himself in a position to take on the fourteen peaks.

I was beginning to fear that everyone who had lost their lives in challenging the fourteen peaks, like Yamada and Hideji Nazuka², might be forgotten. I think there’s something really noble in the loss of their lives in that pursuit. It was incredibly galling to me that people seemed to be forgetting the achievements of Yamada and Nazuka, and were beginning to lose interest in Japanese climbers because not one had summited the fourteen peaks. So I took it upon myself to do it.

Have you already drawn up plans for your next goal?
I want to keep challenging myself to see how far I can climb. This climb of those fourteen peaks was definitely a part of that. Because I was saved from death to be allowed to continue on to climb those fourteen peaks, I can’t really consider myself as having climbed all fourteen of them. There is an endless number of mountains on the face of this Earth, so really, you could say that I have only actually climbed fourteen of them. So I couldn’t completely say that I’ve climbed them myself. I’ve been able to climb all the mountains I wanted up to know, and I hope that I’ll be able to continue doing just that. Whatever happens, from here on out, climbing is a brand new thing.

What do you mean by that?
Now that I have been able to do the fourteen peaks, I think that proves that there are some “old school” climbers left in Japan. Instead of the built up sort of mountain climbing that uses old things, with the achievement of summiting these fourteen peaks in the older way, it opens up the start of a new kind of climbing.
It would be great if people see what I did and for example, since I used oxygen on Makalu, Everest, and K2, try things like taking on the fourteen peaks completely without the use of extra oxygen, or taking the peaks on using a variety of new routes instead of the established normal routes.
This is how I will become a person of the past. The old era is over now. Rather than my own name, I want to leave the names of those fourteen Himalayan peaks in people’s minds. My hope is that my climbing might lead to even just a few more people who decide they want to go to the Himalayas, which they have probably never seen except in an atlas once, or who decide they want to at least go to Kathmandu, who think that they would like to try to climb those mountains themselves.
Even right now through doing this interview, by me talking about the Himalayas this way, there might be people who can envision it in three dimensions. I feel extremely fortunate to have been able to carry on my challenge of climbing the peaks. It’s a really blessed place that we're in, so even more than a duty or a calling, I consider this a role that must be filled by someone who has been doing it for some time.

So you plan to continue climbing even as you start to undertake such enlightened activities?
Up until the 90s, with old school climbing, you couldn’t do anything unless your organization had the money. But the truth is, now you can just decide to leave next week. Even in soccer, there are players that will hop on a plane and play all over the world. It’s the same idea. Climbers today are freer than they’ve ever been. I want to keep them going further.
Setting up base camp is like a building a huge secret fort with your friends. Planning what you’ll take, what you’ll do when you’re there, deciding what color the tablecloth should be, what pictures you’ll put up, isn’t that the part that’s the most fun?