Yuki Tanabe (b. 1972) is a type designer from Sapporo who has spent two decades reviving letterforms for endangered Ainu and Ryukyuan scripts. After studying typography in Zurich, she returned to Hokkaido in 2001 and collaborated with elders to restore handwritten records that colonial archives had mislabeled as decoration. Her 2008 font family Satporokeshi combined traditional brushstroke angles with digital readability, making Ainu syllabaries usable on modern screens for the first time. Tanabe insists that typography is literacy infrastructure, not nostalgia: "A script that cannot render a tax form or a library catalog remains ceremonial, not functional." In 2019 she launched an open-source repository to invite junior designers into the restoration work.