Korean hanbok, highlights that little known fact that Japanese women were also forced to serve as sexual slaves during the Asia-Pacific War. Shimada has carried out this performance multiple times since 2012 at contested locations in Japan such as the Yasukuni Shrine and the National Diet, as well as in South Korea, and alongside the international feminist art collective Tomorrow Girls Troop in Colorado, U.S. Censorship Although Shimada is now recognized as an important artist in Japan, the critical nature of her artwork initially made her career difficult because the exhibition and distribution of her work was generally more accepted in countries outside of her home country. Shimada opened up about her experiences dealing with censorship in Japan at a professional luncheon entitled “Freedom of Expression in the Arts” held in June 1994 at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in Tokyo. She reported that although her work had never been explicitly shut down, she had experienced “soft” censorship in the form of audience outrage and curatorial reluctance, concluding that it is much easier for her to exhibit her work in Germany (where she was living at the time) than in her native Japan. 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. She created an etching of the Showa Emperor with his face scratched out entitled A Picture to be Burned (1993), burned one of the prints, and sent its ashes in a plastic bag to the museum alongside a letter requesting her work be added to their collection. She wrote, “As some say that museums are graveyards of art, it may be appropriate to send you the ashes.” 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?'" (in Japanese,『「表現の不自由展」その後」』), which led to the protest and closure of the exhibition. Also in 2019, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs withdrew its support for another exhibition due to its political nature, the Japan Unlimited at the MuseumsQuartier Wien in Vienna, Austria, which also included one of Shimada’s etchings from her and BuBu’s Made in Occupied Japan (1998) series. The particular piece was a satirical image of Emperor Hirohito posing with the U.S. general Douglas MacArthur that aimed to blurred the boundaries of