Irene Hirano Inouye, a prodigious fundraiser who led the nation’s premier Japanese American museum in Los Angeles and built bridges across cultures with groundbreaking projects, has died. She was 71.

Inouye was diagnosed last year with leiomyosarcoma, a rare form of cancer, and died April 7 at her Los Angeles home, said her daughter, Jennifer Hirano.

The Japanese American leader, whose soft-spoken mien belied powerful drive and farsighted vision, rose to national prominence in the nonprofit world as board chair of the Ford and Kresge foundations.

A major achievement was her “shuttle diplomacy” between the two foundations, which resulted in their combined gifts of $225 million to jump-start the successful 2014 effort to bring Detroit out of the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy, according to a statement by Kresge Foundation President and Chief Executive Rip Rapson and Board Chair Elaine Rosen.

But in California and across Asian America, Inouye was best known for her work to empower women of color, develop the Japanese American National Museum and launch an international council to deepen ties between the United States and Japan.

She was the widow of U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, the powerful Hawaii Democrat who died in 2012.

“Irene was a visionary and she was golden in everything she touched,” said Mitchell T. Maki, president of the Go For Broke National Education Center, which preserves and shares the history of Japanese American veterans of World War II.

Irene Ann Yasutake was born Oct. 7, 1948, in Los Angeles, the oldest of Jean and Michael Yasutake’s four children.

Her mother was a homemaker and her father a U.S. Army major who served in the military intelligence service as a translator during World War II and later became an international businessman.

After graduating from USC with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in public administration, she worked as executive director for T.H.E. Clinic, a South L.A. health clinic that primarily served women of color. Through her community work, she met L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who was then a high school teacher, and forged a lifelong friendship.

At his invitation, she joined the local board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and, Ridley-Thomas said, worked to spread the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s founding vision of social change through nonviolent resistance.

“She was always there,” Ridley-Thomas said. “She was warm, unassuming, loyal, faithful, diligent. I just wish there were more people like her in the world.”

In 1976, she caught the attention of Gov. Jerry Brown, who appointed her to head the California Commission on the Status of Women. She advocated gender pay equity and called out efforts by male legislators to defund the commission as “an insult to every woman in California.”

In 1980, she helped form local and national networks to empower Asian Pacific American women, who she believed lacked visibility and leadership opportunities. She fought against the abuse of Asian women brought to the U.S. as mail-order brides and sought greater representation in educational, employment and political realms.

“Many of us are conditioned to sit back, get done what needs to be done and not confront,” she told The Times in 1980. “It’s much easier that way, but we must fight against falling into that trap.”

Her defining work came after businessman Bruce T. Kaji and a group of World War II veterans joined forces in 1985 to launch what was then an audacious idea: a national museum to honor the history and culture of Japanese Americans.

Inouye, whose late husband was a Medal of Honor recipient for his actions in WWII, was hired over 150 applicants in 1988, according to a museum history.

In addition to Hirano, Inouye is survived by her mother, Jean Yasutake, sisters Linda Hayashi and Patti Yasutake, brother Steven Yasutake, stepson Kenny Inouye and granddaughter Maggie Inouye.