Two married couples, Team Spinstra, from left, Air Force Staff Sgt. Mark Williams, Senior Master Sgt. Manuel Campos, Marina Williams and Christine Campos, took part in a 9/11 stair climb at Yokota Air Base, Japan, on Sept. 11, 2023. (Juan King/Stars and Stripes)
YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan – A vacant nine-story residential tower provided the setting Monday for a memorial stair climb at this airlift hub in western Tokyo, an event that’s become synonymous with 9/11 commemorations in the U.S. and beyond.
About 100 people gathered at Yokota for the event, part of a widespread tradition 22 years after the terrorist attacks that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and killed hundreds more at the Pentagon and in a downed airliner in Pennsylvania.
In New York alone, 2,753 people died when terrorists linked to al-Qaida flew two hijacked airliners into the towers. Among the dead were 60 New York police officers and 343 firefighters and paramedics, whose deeds that day climbing the towers’ stairwells to find survivors are remembered in the stair climbs.
“It is good to be out to commemorate the tragedy and keep the memory alive,” Staff Sgt. Douglas Martin, an event organizer, said Monday at Yokota.
Air Force 2nd. Lt. Shyo Yamamoto of San Francisco struggled to finish the event last year, he said Monday while waiting for the event to begin.
This year, he was part of the team from the 374th Civil Engineering Squadron, one of 15 teams and 14 individuals participating.
“I think we’ll have a pretty decent time, I’m not sure about winning or not,” Yamamoto said.
In the Yokota event, individuals make 12.2 laps up and down the residential tower, with each team member taking three laps of six floors. The distance covered by each individual or team equals the 110 floors of the original towers that stood in Manhattan.
More than 70 people took part in a stair climb Sept. 11, 2023, at Yokota Air Base, Japan, to remember more than 340 first responders who died in New York City on 9/11 helping others escape the twin towers. (Juan King/Stars and Stripes)
Along with more somber ceremonies, hundreds of memorial stair climbs are held close to the 9/11 anniversary across the United States. Many are sponsored by fire departments. Some are simple memorial feats of endurance, some are fundraisers.
Japanese fire departments in nearby Fussa and Akishima sent teams to the event at Yokota; the Akishima firefighters won the team event, according to Martin.
To make the memorial climbs, firefighters often donned their full firefighting gear, a reminder of the conditions the doomed New York responders faced.
However, the International Fallen Firefighters Foundation, whose website lists 38 stair climbs this year, advises firefighters to wear their gear “only when it is necessary for protection” over concerns that it’s manufactured with PFAS, a toxic chemical used as a protective coating.
The Yokota participants wore fitness clothing and breathing apparatus, a vestige of firefighting gear. From the first floor, each runner picked up dog tags with the names of first responders who died during the attack, carried them to the succeeding floors and dropped them inside firefighter helmets, said Ulises Meija, a base firefighter.
At Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, participants in its stair climb Friday each carried a photo of a fallen New York firefighter, according to the base’s official Facebook page.
At Yokota, Tetsuya Hayashi, a civilian employee of the civil engineering squadron, won the men’s individual competition; Tech. Sgt. Alexandrea Vidato was the top female finisher, Martin said..
Competitor Zach Webster, a member of the civil engineering squadron, said he looked forward to the event with some trepidation. He trained on the stairs of a vacant tower a week before the event.
With a chuckle before the start, Webster said he anticipated “a lot of pain, exhaustion, maybe nausea.”
