Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Ianpanu was born in 1853 in an Ainu village in the Hidaka region of present-day Hokkaido. In 1877 she married the Japanese entrepreneur Suzuki Kamezo, and they settled down in a newly built shack at the intersection of the Ishikari and Chubetsu Rivers (Suzuki was called Kamekichi by the Ainu who found his original name hard to pronounce, and the delta where they lived acquired the name Kamekichi Island). As a native Ainu speaker, Ianpanu was helpful in her husband’s trading. It is thought that the traditional Hidaka Ainu kaparamip clothing design, appliqué on a white background, spread to the Kamikawa region through Ianpanu’s presence after her marriage.

Her marriage to Suzuki continued through the 1890 establishment of Asahikawa Village (present-day Asahikawa City) and various business prospects, but in 1896 she left him and moved on her own to Nayoro, further north. There she was sometimes known by the Japanese name Ohnuki Ai. Reports of her activities there are colorful and wide-ranging; she was a beauty who also hunted bear and did anything a man could do; she built a meeting hall in the village to teach the local Ainu residents to speak and read Japanese; she raised local orphans, sometimes traveling long distances to reunite them with their original families. She was active in getting a law enacted permitting (“permitting”) Ainu to use farmland left unused by the Japanese; after the law passed, when Japanese settlers tried to trick the Ainu out of the land they had applied for, Ianpanu went to the Hokkaido Government to protest and won her case.

In 1909, Kannari Imekanu (Matsu) opened a Sunday school which, alongside its Christian missionary work, became a gathering place for women yukar singers, including Ianpanu along with Imekanu herself, Kawamura Muisammap [? I can’t find a credible romanization for her], Sugimura Kinarapuk, and Hiraga Sadamo, teaching and sharing their performances.

Ianpanu died in 1924, at the age of 71, in an accident while fishing for salmon in the Teshio River.

Sources
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A4%E3%82%A2%E3%83%B3%E3%83%91%E3%83%8C (Japanese) Ianpanu’s Wikipedia page. I couldn’t find anything about her in English.
https://static.hokkaido-np.co.jp/files/manadigi/img/yomu-shiru/clipping/mintara/mintara201804.pdf (Japanese) Newspaper article (for children) with delightful illustrations