Our Town 2025 - Takuma Inoue

First Ascent of Pungi, an Unclimbed Peak in the Himalayas!

In October 2024, the Pungi Expedition Team led by Mr. Inoue (a fourth-year university student living in Wakabadai) successfully made the first ascent of Pungi (elevation 6,524m) in the Nepal Himalayas, a peak that no one had climbed before.

Mr. Inoue insisted on going with a team of students only, without the help of guides or university alumni, leveraging the students' strengths such as physical strength and time, and decided to challenge Pungi, an unclimbed peak with some available information.

However, when forming the expedition team, there were no volunteers from the university I belonged to, so we formed the team with people from universities contacted through the Student Section of the Japanese Alpine Club.

Therefore, we considered deepening teamwork to be the most important aspect when facing challenges, and during the winter season, we ensured time together as a team by spending half of each month together.

Mr. Inoue, who served as the general leader, made an effort to understand each teammate's thoughts and personality in order to gain their trust. As a result of strengthening mutual trust, they were able to successfully summit the unclimbed peak. Despite many hardships, he felt that climbing Pungi and dedicating his four years of university to the mountains was worthwhile.

When asked about the appeal of challenging mountains, the answer was "being able to have trustworthy companions." In mountaineering, it is common to connect with teammates using ropes for safety and coordination, but "you cannot tie the rope without trust, and it is precisely because of trust that it can be done." Mr. Inoue shared, "I feel that trustworthy companions, to the extent that you can entrust your life to them, are rare in life, and gaining such trustworthy companions is one of the attractions."

When asked about future goals, they said, "I want to guide the juniors who want to go on expeditions and leave behind know-how on how to go. I don't want it to end with us; I want to use this challenge as an opportunity to create teams that can continue to take on unclimbed peaks in the future. Also, focusing on the difficult points experienced this time, I want to challenge the difficult parts of Japanese mountains and improve myself."

Following this ascent, Mr. Inoue's challenge to aim for even greater heights continues.