What year did Masaoka Shiki die?

Masaoka Shiki died in 1902. His death came on September 19, 1902, in Tokyo, when he was 34 years old. Tuberculosis had weakened him for years, and he also developed Pott’s disease, a form of tuberculosis affecting the spine. By the final years of his life, he was largely bedridden and wrote from his sickbed.

Shiki was born Masaoka Noboru in 1867 and became one of the central figures in the modernization of Japanese poetry. He argued that haiku should be treated as a serious literary genre and popularized the term “haiku” for the independent form that had developed from the opening verse of linked poetry.

His pen name, Shiki, refers to the lesser cuckoo, traditionally imagined in Japanese literature as coughing blood while singing—a poignant allusion to his illness. Despite his short life, he produced thousands of poems and influenced modern haiku, tanka, literary criticism, and journalism. A common mix-up is confusing his death year with the year he became bedridden, 1897, or with the year his magazine Hototogisu was founded.