The haiku poet Masaoka Shiki called on poets to practice shasei, sketching from life. The magazine Waraku writes that his idea of shasei had direct or indirect links to Western-style painters, among them Nakamura Fusetsu, Shimomura Izan and Asai Chū.
In 1894, Shiki asked Shimomura to draw the illustrations for the haiku column of the newspaper Shō-Nippon. Shimomura declined, and the work went to Nakamura.