Masaoka Shiki

A haiku poet who sits in both the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame and the go hall of fame is not a sentence I expected to write, and Masaoka Shiki managed it inside thirty-four years. Born in Matsuyama, he reached Tokyo Imperial University, then spent his last years bedridden while producing close to twenty thousand verses. His most quoted line - biting a persimmon, a temple bell sounding at Horyuji - uses almost no ornament and still hands you an entire autumn. The one about fifteen or so cockscombs in a garden was argued over for decades, but read it as the exact field of vision of a man who could only look out at a small yard and it lands very differently. He preached sketching from life. What he meant was: look properly. Nobody looked harder.

Name (English)

Masaoka Shiki

Name (Japanese)

正岡子規

Born

October 14, 1867 – September 19, 1902

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Libra / Rabbit

Origin

Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

poet / baseball player / writer / journalist / waka poet

High school

Kaisei Junior & Senior High School

University

Tokyo Imperial University

Awards & achievements

• Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame
• Nihon Ki-in Hall of Fame

Motto

Private

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%AD%A3%E5%B2%A1%E5%AD%90%E8%A6%8F

Tags

• Ehime Prefecture
• poet
• baseball player
• writer

Last updated

2026-07-27

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.