Vag Mogs

I started this post a long time ago. I wanted to write about the Vagina Monologues but it turned into a hugely confused, emotional something about how lost and out of it I have been feeling lately (worrying my poor parents by going incommunicado (does that make sense?)) and a rant about Japan what I've found here and what I will be happy to leave behind.
Since my home Internet is bung, I was adding snippets and stray thoughts every time I checked my email at school. It all got a bit much. I will try and order my thoughts and then will write something to let you all know where I'm at.
Here is the fairly lucid stuff I wrote about the Vag Mogs...
Although preceded by the craziness that precedes any production, thanks to the dedication of Titia who organised the whole shebang this year, everything came together on the day. I offered to make sashes for all involved which turned out to be far more of a headache than it should have been, but we all looked splendid on stage. I was involved in a few of the monologues, but my main one was "My Vagina was My Village" about the systematic rape that took place during the Bosnian war. It was pretty intense and knocked me around a bit, but I think it went OK (there is enough of the egotistic actor in me that I wanted some critical assessment of my performance but the best I got was "wow, awful"). We raised 80,000円 (about 1000 NZD) for the local woman's refuge. I shall post pictures if I can.
This year the spotlight (the Vagina Monologues focuses on the plight of a different group of women every year) was called 'reclaiming peace' remembering the women of the world affected by war, and the women left picking up the pieces when the fighting stops. Last year the spotlight was on comfort women, those 200,000 women from all over South-East and East Asia forced into prostitution by the Japanese military during the second world war. As you may remember, we elected not to perform the comfort women monologue for a number of reasons, one being that it is a condition of our visas that we do not make political statements. As I was writing about this year's performance, I read something that made me really, really angry. In 1993 the Japanese government issued a half-hearted apology to the surviving comfort women (but refused to offer any compensation) and it gave hope to the thousands of women still alive that something official might follow. Last week the Japanese Prime Minister denied anew that the military was involved in coercing (abducting and forcing) these women into prostitution. Some members of his party are calling for the apology to be rescinded. This made me grimly satisfied with my decision to be leave Japan and it's baffling nationalistic treatment of it's past. I need to be somewhere where I am not prevented from taking part in the political process on any level. But... is leaving really the most effective protest? where would a country be if every resident/citizen who cared about social issues skipped the country because they had a government who didn't? I joked about never coming back to New Zealand if National got into power in the last election, but what good am I overseas? I don't quite know what I am getting at here, or how this all ties together and honestly I don't think I'll be living in New Zealand long-term in the near future. But no matter where I am, I think I can safely assume I will be somewhere less frustrating, where I can make my voice heard. Here endeth the rant. The original was crazier, I promise.