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Matsuo Bashō

Matsuo Bashō

1644 CE1694 CE · Poet · Ueno, Iga Province (now Iga, Mie Prefecture)

Matsuo Bashō was a Japanese poet of the early Edo period, widely regarded as the foremost master of the hokku, the verse form later called haiku. Born to a minor samurai family in Ueno, Iga Province, he served the local Tōdō household before moving to Edo, where he built a reputation as a teacher and judge of linked verse. From a riverside hut in Fukagawa—planted with a banana tree, or bashō, from which he took his name—he undertook long walking journeys across Japan. These produced travel diaries blending prose and verse, most famously Oku no Hosomichi ("The Narrow Road to the Interior"). He died in Osaka in 1694.

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Ueno, Iga Province (now Iga, Mie Prefecture)

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Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with Matsuo Bashō’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

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