I visited this shrine with an old friend, Tim Marrable. What follows comes mainly from the shrine's home page.

It is said to have been founded as an Inari Jinja and was the tutelary shrine for Shimuzudani, the current Akasaka and Hitotsugimura districts. In 1634 it was moved to its current location when the outer moat of Edo Castle was built. Its bettoji was Inarisan Fukuden-ji Hozo-in.

In 1637, during the Shimahara Rebellion, the feudal lord of Nihonbashi-Odenmacho, a certain Magome Kanyu, was appointed by the Shogunate as a logistics officer and for his services was awarded a plot of land in the centre of what is now Yotsuya. A shrine seems to have been set up on the site and it was named Inarisan Hozo-in Tenno-sha. in 1643 the kami of Kandamyojin-sha, now Kanda Jinja, Susanoo-Mikoto, the tutelary deity of Nihonbashi-Denmacho, was jointly enshrined there at the urging of the local residents. The shrine then became known as Inari Tenno-go-sha. It was later called Yotsuya Tenno-sha, a name it retained until the onset of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 when it was renamed as Suga Jinja. In 1873 it was given Village Shrine ranking.

Remnants of the old shrine still exist, but construction of many of the shrine buildings that were destroyed in the firebombings of May 1945 was completed in 1828. Two buildings that were not destroyed then were the main hall and a subsidiary shrine; they were, however, quite decrepit and their reconstruction was started in 1968. Work was completed on May 9, 1989 and the ceremony for moving a deity to a new site was held nine days later.

The shrine's name derives from what could be interpreted as a homophonic pun on something Susano-o is said to have said after his bloody annihilation of the eight-forked serpent Yamato-no-Orochi in the upper reaches of the River Hi (簸の川) in Izumo prior to taking Kushinada-hime to wife. His words were “Having come to this land my heart feels SugaSugashi (心須賀、須賀し). This expression is still used In modern Japanese but is written with just one, repeated, kanji, 清清しい, also pronounced sugasugashii. Both expressions mean refreshing, bracing, brisk. He then went to live in a nearbv palace.