was a Japanese poet and author known for her atomic bomb literature.

Biography

Shōda was born in Etajima in

Hiroshima Prefecture is a Prefectures of Japan, prefecture of Japan located in the Chūgoku region of Honshu. Hiroshima Prefecture has a population of 2,811,410 (1 June 2019) and has a geographic area of 8,479 km² (3,274 sq mi). Hiroshima Prefecture borders Okayama ...

in 1910. Around 1920 her family moved to

Ujina Ujina is a Village located in Hodal-Nuh road in Nuh district in Haryana. In Ancient time, Ujina was popular with the name of Ujina Lake as in rainy season it totally covered with water and people of nearby territories often came here for sightse ...

, just outside

Hiroshima is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 1,199,391. The gross domestic product (GDP) in Greater Hiroshima, Hiroshima Urban Employment Area, was US$61.3 billion as of 2010. Kazumi Matsui h ...

, and in 1925 she enrolled in a

Jōdo Shinshū , also known as Shin Buddhism or True Pure Land Buddhism, is a school of Pure Land Buddhism. It was founded by the former Tendai Japanese monk Shinran. Shin Buddhism is the most widely practiced branch of Buddhism in Japan. History Shinran ( ...

girls' high school, graduating in 1929. In the late 1920s, she started publishing poetry in Kōran, a monthly literary magazine. Shōda married engineer Takamoto Suematsu and the two had a son, Shin'ichirō. In 1940 her husband died and in 1945 her family home was destroyed, forcing the family to move into the city of Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945, the city was devastated by the atomic bomb attack. Shōda's home at that time was only two kilometers from ground zero. By February of the next year, her father had died of intestinal cancer and later her son also fell ill. Following Japan's surrender, Shōda started writing traditional tanka poetry on the theme of the atomic bombing. She had difficulty publishing both because of the subject and because of her relative lack of experience. In 1946 she succeeded in publishing 39 of her poems in the journal Fuschichō. In 1947, evading Occupation censorship, she secretly published ''Sange'' ("Penitence" or "Repentance"), a tanka anthology. 150 copies of the book were mimeographed by a clerk at the Hiroshima prison and Shōda personally distributed it to victims of the blast. She published little after ''Sange'' until the 1960s when, in 1962 she published a memoir, ''A Ringing in the Ears''. Shortly after its publication, she fell ill with breast cancer and her health deteriorated rapidly. She died on 15 June 1965, the year before the publication of her second tanka collection, ''Sarusuberi'' ("Crape myrtle"), published in 1966. "Reiko" along with "Chanchako Bachan" ("Old woman in chanchako, or a padded sleeveless jacket”), was posthumously published in ''Dokyumento Nihonjin'' ("Document of the Japanese") in 1969. ''Pikakko-chan'' contains seven stories, including “Reiko” and "Chanchako Bachan". One of her poems from ''Sange'' appears on the Monument of the A-bombed Teachers and Students of National Elementary Schools in Hiroshima.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Shoda, Shinoe 1910 births 1965 deaths Hibakusha Writers from Hiroshima Deaths from breast cancer Deaths from cancer in Japan 20th-century Japanese women writers 20th-century Japanese poets Japanese women poets