This episode examines the work of Japanese artist Shimada Yoshiko, whose practice has spent more than three decades confronting Japanese imperialism, wartime responsibility, feminism, and historical memory. Beginning with my visit to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where Shimada performed Being a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman, I consider how her work intervenes in spaces and images shaped by official memory. The episode traces her formative years at Scripps College, her return to a highly gendered social environment in Japan, and the impact of Emperor Hirohito’s death in 1989, which propelled her toward archival research and a sustained investigation of Japan’s wartime past. Works such as A Picture to Be Burnt and Tied to Apron Strings reveal her recurring concern with how imperial ideology entered everyday life, including the mobilization of Japanese women through domesticity, motherhood, and patriotic duty. The episode then turns to Shimada’s work on the history of comfort women, including Comfort Women/Women of Conformity, Look at Me/Look at You, and Being a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman. Rather than offering a simple division between victims and perpetrators, Shimada asks how gender, empire, nationality, class, and historical position intersect, and what responsibilities follow from belonging to the majority. Her performances use modest means—bronze-colored paint, a taped mouth, stillness, a kimono, and the artist’s own body—to interrupt official spaces such as Yasukuni Shrine and the National Diet. Through these gestures, Shimada turns spectatorship into self-examination and asks what can transform seeing into responsibility. Her work ultimately suggests that art does not need to resolve historical conflict in order to matter; its regenerative force can lie in keeping difficult histories open, preventing comfortable closure, and sustaining the capacity for historical responsibility. Acknowledgement: This episode was made possible by a grant from CARE (Comfort Women Action for Redress and Education). Cover image: Detail from a documentary photograph of Shimada Yoshiko performing Being a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman in front of Yasukuni Shrine, Tokyo, August 2012. Image courtesy of Shimada Yoshiko. Key References Hagiwara, Hiroko. “Comfort Women: Women of Conformity: The Work of Shimada Yoshiko.” In Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, edited by Griselda Pollock, 253–265. London: Routledge, 1996. Jennison, Rebecca. “‘Post-Colonial’ Feminist Locations: The Art of Tomiyama Taeko and Shimada Yoshiko.” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English Supplement, no. 12 (1997): 84–108. Kunimoto, Namiko. “Situating Being a Statue of a Japanese ‘Comfort Woman’: Shimada Yoshiko, Bourgeois Liberalism, and the Afterlives of Japanese Imperialism.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8, no. 2 (2022): 170–200. Mackie, Vera. Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Nakamura, Jessica. Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020. Seo, Akwi. “Toward Postcolonial Feminist Subjectivity: Korean Women’s Redress Movement for ‘Comfort Women.’” In Rethinking Japanese Feminisms, edited by Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker, 230–250. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. Shigematsu, Setsu. Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Tan, Eliza. Yoshiko Shimada: Art, Feminism and Memory in Japan after 1989. PhD diss., Kingston University, 2016. Tan, Eliza. “Shimada Yoshiko’s Repertoire of Remembrance: Art Activism as a Response to Japanese Colonialism and Military Sexual Violence.” Journal of Gender Studies 34 (2025). Takenaka, Akiko. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. Tomiyama Taeko, Shimada Yoshiko, and Rebecca Jennison. “Testimony and Art.” 1997. Translated by Rebecca Jennison. Art Platform Japan Translation Series, 2022. Originally published as “Shōgen to āto,” Gendai Shisō 25, no. 10 (September 1997): 36–62. Yoshimi, Yoshiaki. Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II. Translated by Suzanne O’Brien. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. My academic website: http://csun.academia.edu/MeiqinWang
