Travel retailer Tasa Meng has teamed up with Japanese sake specialist Asahi Shuzo to launch a gift box in honour of author and essayist Masaoka Shiki.
He is regarded as a major figure in the development of modern haiku poetry, credited with writing nearly 20,000 stanzas during his short lifetime.
The Dassai brand takes its name from a word meaning ‘otter festival’, referencing otters frolicking in a river in Japan’s Yamaguchi region where Asahi Shuzo is headquartered. Masaoka Shiki adopted ‘Dassai’ as a penname, because he would often scatter his reading material all over his room in much the same way otters spread out fish. |
The gift box features a sketch of the haiku master and is highlighted by Tasa Meng in a month-long activation. According to the travel retailer, it is its first sake promotion since the onset of COVID-19.
Masaoka Shiki was born in 1867 and died at the age of 34 in 1902. A tuberculosis sufferer, Shiki is regarded as the father of haiku poem in its current form. A haiku is traditionally a Japanese poem consisting of three short lines that do not rhyme. The origins of haiku poems can be traced back as far as the 9th century. Apart from his literary interests, Shiki popularised the new sport of baseball in Japan by producing a textbook on the game, with Japanese expressions for the relevant terms. He called the game yakyu which means field-ball. Shiki was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002. |
