[3] Shimada was born and raised in Tachikawa, western Tokyo, near the U.S. Air Force Base where her father worked during the height of the US's military involvement in Southeast Asia.

[8] Shimada also spent time living in Berlin and New York City and is comfortable with both the German and English language, which has aided her in building a transnational platform for her body of work.

[3] Shimada’s oeuvre engages with the way that wartime history has been preserved and perpetuated in attitudes and cultural memory in present-day Japanese society, with particular interest in the role of women in World War II as both aggressors and victims.

[12] Shimada’s early series of etchings entitled “Past Imperfect” engaged with the artist's deep interest in gender roles while challenging the popular viewpoint that the Asia-Pacific War was an 'unavoidable tragedy.

'[7] She debuted this series together at Tanishima Gallery in Tokyo’s Meguro Ward in 1993, presenting 25 xerox transfer etchings compiled from newspaper clippings and archival photographs of various women during the Asia-Pacific War.

[4][16] This layout starkly contrasted the texts of Japanese feminist writers who supported Imperial ideologies against the Korean women’s testimonies of kidnapping, rape, violence, and forced sexual slavery on the opposite pages.

[4] Shimada presented her installation piece, Black Boxes + Voice Recorder (1994) at the exhibition “Gender: Beyond Memory” at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 1996.

[7][8] This work allowed gallery visitors to enter a confession booth and privately write down their family secrets and submit them in a sealed box, which the artist could later select and display in a large tansu (traditional Japanese chest of drawers).

This work may have been inspired by Shimada's own discovery that her grandfather had been a policemen before the war and was one of many ordered to “dispose of dangerous criminals” in the Kantō Massacre mass murdering of an estimated 6,000 ethnic Korean residents of Japan that followed the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.

[12] Shimada’s choice to dress in a kimono rather than a traditional Korean hanbok, highlights that little known fact that Japanese women were also forced to serve as sexual slaves during the Asia-Pacific War.

[22] In 1993 Shimada staged a protest against the Toyama Modern Art Museum for its censorship and destruction of artist Ōura Nobuyuki’s satirical collage of Emperor Hirohito.

[22] She wrote, “As some say that museums are graveyards of art, it may be appropriate to send you the ashes.”[22] A Picture to Be Burned (1993) was put in the spotlight again for its inclusion, alongside a representation of a ‘comfort woman,’ in the 2019 Aichi Triennale's "After 'Freedom of Expression?'"

[2] She curated Nakajima Yoshio Syndrome in 2015 at Atsukobarouh gallery in Shibuya, Tokyo, as well as From Nirvana to Catastrophe at Ota Fine Arts in 2017, for which she wrote and edited the exhibition catalogues.