18 Facts About Masaoka Shiki

Masaoka Shiki, pen-name of Masaoka Noboru, was a Japanese poet, author, and literary critic in Meiji period Japan.

Some consider Masaoka Shiki to be one of the four great haiku masters, the others being Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa.

Masaoka Shiki, or rather Tsunenori as he was originally named, was born in Matsuyama City in Iyo Province to a samurai class family of modest means.

Masaoka Shiki's father, Tsunenao, was an alcoholic who died when Shiki was five years of age.

Masaoka Shiki's mother, Yae, was a daughter of Ohara Kanzan, a Confucian scholar.

At age 15 Masaoka Shiki became something of a political radical, attaching himself to the then-waning Freedom and People's Rights Movement and getting himself banned from public speaking by the principal of Matsuyama Middle School, which he was attending.

The young Masaoka Shiki first attended his hometown Matsuyama Middle School, where Kusama Tokiyoshi, a leader of the discredited Freedom and People's Rights Movement, had recently served as principal.

Masaoka Shiki was first enrolled in Kyoritsu Middle School and later matriculated into University Preparatory School.

Contemporary to Masaoka Shiki was the idea that traditional Japanese poetic short forms, such as the haiku and tanka, were waning due to their incongruity in the modern Meiji period.

In 1892, the same year he dropped out of university, Masaoka Shiki published a serialized work advocating haiku reform, Dassai Shooku Haiwa or "Talks on Haiku from the Otter's Den".

The above work, on tanka, is an example of Masaoka Shiki's expanded focus during the last few years of his life.

Bedsore and morphine-addled, little more than a year before his death Masaoka Shiki began writing sickbed diaries.

Masaoka Shiki continued to cough blood throughout his return voyage to Japan and was hospitalized in Kobe.

Masaoka Shiki came to Tokyo, and his group of disciples there were known as the "Nippon school" after the paper where he had been haiku editor and that now published the group's work.

Masaoka Shiki developed Pott's disease and began using morphine as a painkiller.

Masaoka Shiki died of tuberculosis in 1902 at age 34.

Masaoka Shiki firmly placed haiku in the category of literature, and this was unique.

Masaoka Shiki played baseball as a teenager and was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002.