[1]: 22 The art historian Kimihiko Nakamura points out that "While Shinoda was encouraged to engage in intellectual and creative activities from quite a young age, they were still considered part of her feminine accomplishments, and she was not expected to become a professional artist.
[1]: 22–23 Soon after her unsuccessful first solo show, and as the Pacific War quickly escalated, Shinoda evacuated to Aizu, Fukushima, in 1941, and her career was suspended until she recovered from tuberculosis in 1947.
The artist noted: "The air of freedom after the war suddenly nurtured the seeds of a desire within me to express the shape of my heart visually.
[1]: 23 Her "early works clearly demonstrate that Shinoda had already established her abstract style through the use of brushstrokes and ink splashes that employed a variety of expressions, even before she moved to New York".
Scholars have widely interpreted the flourishing of modernist calligraphy in postwar Japan as a movement initiated by Hidai Nannkoku and his predominantly male students.
'"[1]: 24 Most famously, in 1952, five calligraphers—Shiryū Morita, Yūichi Inoue, Sōgen Eguchi, Bokushi Nakamura, and Yoshimichi Sekiya—formed a new avant-garde calligraphy (zen'ei sho; 前衛書) group called Bokujinkai (墨人会; People of the Ink).
[1]: 24 "These associations provided Shinoda with opportunities to exhibit her work regularly with leading male calligraphers, and gradually she garnered acclaim and financial security.
"In 1954, Shinoda had a critically successful solo show at the Ginza Matsuzakaya department store, displaying her abstract ink paintings in a space specially designed by Tange Kenzō, one of postwar Japan's foremost architects.
In 1954, along with several leading male calligraphers, Shinoda was selected for a group show entitled Japanese Calligraphy at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The following year, the Brussels-born CoBrA painter Pierre Alechinsky visited Japan and captured Shinoda, Ōsawa [Gakyū], Morita [Shiryū] and Eguchi [Sōgen] in his art film, Calligraphie Japonaise.
[1]: 25 During her two-year stay in the US, Shinoda quickly garnered admiration from her international viewers, and held solo exhibitions at various cities including New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, Paris and Brussels.
In the 1960s, "Shinoda establish [sic] her mature style [that] wide, bold lines—such as blurs, hazes, and subtle but rich variations of tone within a black field—dominate the picture surface and express more clearly the nature of ink".
[6]: 104 [3] In 1974, Shinoda was commissioned by Zōjō-ji Temple to produce sliding screen (fusuma) paintings that spanned 95 feet (29 m) and extended over three panels.
Kimihiko Nakamura points out that "Shinoda consciously maintained her distance from the patriarchal and hierarchical Japanese art world and, with her critical success outside her homeland, established herself as an acclaimed international artist".
[8] In the 1960s and 1970s, "While Shinoda's monochrome ink abstractions particularly attracted attention on the international art scene, the artist was also seeking a new mode of expression.
[1]: 22 In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.