Shinoe Shōda (正田 篠枝, Shōda Shinoe, December 1910 – 15 June 1965) was a Japanese poet and author known for her atomic bomb literature.

Shōda was born in Etajima in Hiroshima Prefecture in 1910.^[1] Around 1920 her family moved to Ujina, just outside Hiroshima, and in 1925 she enrolled in a Jōdo Shinshū girls' high school, graduating in 1929.^[1]

In the late 1920s, she started publishing poetry in Kōran, a monthly literary magazine.^[1]

Shōda married engineer Takamoto Suematsu and the two had a son, Shin'ichirō.^[1] In 1940 her husband died and in 1945 her family home was destroyed, forcing the family to move into the city of Hiroshima.^[1] 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.^[1] By February of the next year, her father had died of intestinal cancer and later her son also fell ill.^[1]

Following Japan's surrender, Shōda started writing traditional tanka poetry on the theme of the atomic bombing.^[1] She had difficulty publishing both because of the subject and because of her relative lack of experience.^[1] In 1946 she succeeded in publishing 39 of her poems in the journal Fuschichō.^[1] In 1947, evading Occupation censorship, she secretly published Sange ("Penitence" or "Repentance"), a tanka anthology.^[1][2][3] 150 copies of the book were mimeographed by a clerk at the Hiroshima prison and Shōda personally distributed it to victims of the blast.^[4][5]

She published little after Sange until the 1960s when, in 1962 she published a memoir, A Ringing in the Ears.^[1] Shortly after its publication, she fell ill with breast cancer and her health deteriorated rapidly.^[1] She died on 15 June 1965,^[1] 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".^[6]

One of her poems from Sange appears on the Monument of the A-bombed Teachers and Students of National Elementary Schools in Hiroshima.^[1]