Shizue Sugano, 60, a relative by marriage to Class-A war criminal Koki Hirota, embarked on her antiwar pilgrimage in 1994.
Her late husband, Takeshi, was the grandson of Hirota, a former prime minister and foreign minister who was hanged as a war criminal in 1948. It was her husband's death in 1993 that prompted Sugano to begin her pilgrimage.
As her husband suffered from a brain tumor that ultimately took his life, he would often be lost between war and reality, suddenly getting up from bed screaming, "Russian soldiers! Run!" Sugano said she realized how much agony her husband had felt throughout his life, noting his pain was aggravated by being associated with a political leader and subsequent war criminal who had sent soldiers off to their deaths in battle.