Shōtetsu

Shōtetsu
Born	1381 Bitchū province, Japan
Died	1459 Kyoto, Japan

Shōtetsu (正徹, 1381-1459 CE) was a Japanese poet during the Muromachi period, and is considered to have been the last poet in the courtly waka tradition; a number of his disciples were important in the development of the renga art form, which led to the haiku.

He was born in 1381 in a minor fortified town in the then province of Bitchū (now Okayama) to a samurai of middling rank named Komatsu Ysukiyo. About ten years after his birth, Shōtetsu's family moved to Kyoto for unknown reasons. At approximately the age of 15 (by the Occidental count), he was sent to the religious center of Nara where he became an acolyte in an unspecified Buddhist temple. He would spend the next five years there studying, among other things, Buddhist scripture.

Shortly after his father's death in 1400 CE, Shōtetsu moved back to Kyoto, and sought out a fellow named Imagawa Ryōshun (b. 1325/1326 ?, d. 1417/1420) and asked him to instruct him in the "Way of Poetry".

This was not an unexpected visit for Ryōshun; he and Shōtetsu had met many times previously. It was this Imagawa Ryōshun, retired military leader, lay priest, respected amateur poet, and accomplished author of polemic essays attacking the enemies of the Reizei poetic clan, who was apparently instrumental (the relevant passage gives an incorrect age for Ryōshun at the period it supposedly occurred, leading Inada Toshinori to believe that the passage conflates a number of events; thus it may be misleading as to the circumstances that introduced Shōtetsu to courtly poetry), in introducing the young Shōtetsu (whose personal name then still was Sonmyōmaru, given name Masakiyo) to poetic composition. From an autobiographic portion of Shōtetsu's extended essay on poetry, Shōtetsu Monogatari:

"A certain preceptor of the Ontoku'in once said to me, "If you want to compose poetry, I will take you with me to the civil administrator's house across the way." At that period of my life, I was still wearing my hair long in the manner of young children, and I felt embarrassed by my extreme youth, but nonetheless I went with the preceptor to the civil administrator's house. ... Then, when I arrived at the poetry meeting itself on the 25th, the highest places on the one side were occupied by Reizei no Tamemasa and Tamekuni, and on the other side by the former shogunal deputy... [who] was at that time a lay priest of more than 80 years... After this occasion, I just kept going again and again to those meetings, and thus gained experience in poetic composition. I was fourteen years old at the time."

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