Special Guest Blogger: Hiraga Gennai

My father was a low ranking Samurai and when i was very small he came to me, put his arm around my shoulder and gave me the: 'you can be anything that you want to be son' speech and i put down my toys, gave it some thought and asked: 'Even a physician who invents and writes books while being an expert in Art and botany who makes his own Pottery and writes satirical sketches and ends up a drunken murder?'
My father looked at me, shrugged and said 'Whatever. Knock yourself out kid' and it was as if fate had been writing all that down because i started out as a doctor and ended dying of tetanus in a prison so in some ways, maybe i should have gave it some more thought.
I began studying herbology and natural sciences under a medical doctor eventually becoming a pharmacologist but gave it up to move to Nagasaki because i loved the Western culture and Nagasaki was full of Dutch people with all their Western knowledge.
I learnt much from the foreign traders, even their language and composed a multi-volume work on the taxonomy of animals and plants while using my newly acquired business acumen to open mining and refining plants, mostly asbestos which i used to invent an amazing fire-resistant cloth but i also constructed one of Japan's first thermometers, came up with a more efficient way to produce charcoal and created a static electricity generator for pain therapy which came in useful for all the people working with asbestos because as a material it was a pain in the arse but even moreso in the lungs.
What was also a pain in the arse was homosexuality, controversial in 18th Century Japan but only because bi-sexuality and switching between male and female lovers was considered the way to go and my book stated that homosexual sex was superior to straight sex and i quickly became one of the voices of the gay movement and my novels reflected my homosexual preferences, 'Rootless Weed' about Enma, the king of the underworld coming to Earth to try it out was my best seller followed by the classic 'A Theory of Farting', a satire about a street performer who uses his butt as a musical instrument.
The mines discovered large deposits of clay so i set up workshops and kilns that lessened the country's reliance on imported stoneware and created a new pottery style mixing Western and Japanese aesthetics called Gennai-ware which impressed artist critics everywhere.
With the art critics on my side, i then invented a style of painting that fused traditional Japanese and Dutch masters styles which were so loved that i set up a school to teach it but, sadly, the school was very short-lived because i killed two workers while drunk who i suspected of stealing my blueprints for a mansion.
I was arrested and eventually died in prison of tetanus so when you are asked as a kid what you want to be when you grow up, don't just blurt out anything because you never know who is listening.