The culture of a country such as Japan is a topic spanning much depth, breadth, and literally thousands of years of history. Nevertheless, it is clear to see how Haiku was born of such a culture and also how the flow of Japan's cultural development would eventually arrive at an art form like Haiku. Also, it is no mystery why, of all places in Japan, Haiku would come of age in Matsuyama.
A constant metaphor used in the study of Japanese history and culture is a giant pendulum of Japanese consciousness in the archipelago. It swings between ages of fascination and emulation of foreign societies and isolationism where that which had been studied incubates and is Japanified or where there is a return to an original Japanese essence of some kind, always readily reverted to after government led experimentation with foreign institutions.
Insofaras a country's culture tends to originate in the country's ancient nobility, much of Japan's literary cultural finds its roots in the imperial court, whose system was originally brought over from China in the 7th century. Graceful courtesans and erudite nobles would pass away the evenings in boats floating through Imperial gardens extemporizing in poetic verse under the full moon. Then such forrets would be recorded, later to become some of the world's oldest novels (The Tale of Genji, Lady Nijo, The Gossamer Years...). The poetic forms used at the time were Waka and Tanka, the forms that were later reformed to Haiku in the 19th century.
However, one of the special characteristics of Japanese history is that the Imperial system soon lost its power and authority reverted back to warlords and ultimately military government. Hence the most cultivated and intellectual of the Japanese ended up being none other than the warrior class through hundreds of years of history. The medieval Japanese poet was thus likely to be a proud, pompous, relatively well off, handsomely garbed, intellectually superior warrior. The warrior elite thus transmitted Japan's literary tradition, wrote its poetry, cultivated its culture throughout most of the latter half of Japan's recorded history from about the 13th century to the Meiji restoration. Masaoka Shiki himself was borne into the warrior class.
Matsuyama, home to a prosperous feudal fief and castle whose lord and retainers distinguished themselves at the famous battle of Sekigahara, was a typical example of the type of pre-modern Japanese society that gave rise to Japanese culture as we know it today. The stratification of society was divided into four classes with warriors on top, then farmers, artisans, and lastly, the commercial class. Famous poets of this period such as Bassho were initially born into the warrior class. The socioeconomic atmosphere in which Matsuyama's cultural elite grew up in was very much influenced by the pomp and circumstance of this well-to-do warrior society.
Throughout Japan's peiods of isolation and emulating of China, and later Europe, one cultural motif remained firm: that was fastidious attention given to aesthetic imagery. Whether the cultural medium is the religion of Shinto, the painting of the Rinpa school, the clothing of kimonos, the practice of tea ceremony, the arranging of flowers, or the writing of Haiku, attention given to imagery, appearance, form, and the overall aesthetic impact of any given cultural subject is a phenonemon easily delineated through centuries of a very hierarchical, ceremonial, etiquette-oriented, form-conscious Japanese character.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of this art form of Haiku indigenous to Matsuyama soil, is the certain mention of a seasonal motif in each poem. The natural environs of Matsuyama -- at once coastal, mountainous, and temperate -- gave ideal inspiration to the Japanese cultural tendency to capture a capsule of beauty in poetic expression and it was in this atmosphere that Haiku developed.