Alongside Kana Hasegawa and Shizunojo Takeshita, she was one of the first women to produce modern haiku.
Her father was frequently transferred to different places for work, so before she turned 12 years old, Sugita had lived in Naha, Okinawa; Chiayi, Taiwan; and Taipei.
In May of that year, she met Kyoshi Takahama at a gathering of haiku poets hosted by Misako Ijima.
Eventually Sugita resumed her work, and in 1930 she won a national prize for scenic haiku.
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.
[3] 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.
[3] 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.