haiku. In 1932, she founded the women-only haiku magazine Hanai, which ran for five issues. Sugita was desperate to publish her own book of poetry. She wrote again and again to Takahama, begging him to write the preface for it, even visiting Tokyo to make a personal appeal, but eventually she was forced to shelve the project. In 1936, for unknown reasons, she was kicked out of the Hototogisu literary community alongside Sojo Hino and Zenjido Yoshioka. At this point, she found herself unable to focus on her work and fell into a long depression. She returned to writing in 1939, putting a more autobiographical slant on her poems. Death and legacy After the end of World War II, in October 1945, Sugita was admitted to a hospital in Fukuoka due to nutritional deficits, as food shortages had plagued the country. On January 21, 1946, she died of a combination of malnutrition and the kidney disease she had long suffered from. She was 56 years old. She was buried in the Sugita family graveyard in Obara Village in Aichi Prefecture (now a part of Toyota City), and in 1957 some of her ashes were brought to the Akahori family cemetery in Matsumoto, Nagano. She did not live to see the publication of her long-awaited poetry collection, which her daughter Masako Ishi, who had become a poet herself, released in 1952. References Japanese haiku poets Japanese women poets Japanese Christians People from Kagoshima 1890 births 1946 deaths