Lola Masing musical

A group of Japanese activists and theater artists are producing a musical on Lola Masing, the comfort woman from Antique. Rie Arima, lead actress, visited the Lola Masing Center for Culture and Peace at the Museo Antiqueño and other sites relevant to Lola Masing's life, including my ancestor's house along Gobierno Street, believed to have been used as a Japanese headquarter during the WWII.

Susan Macabuag of the Asia Women's Rights Center-Malaya Lolas, our partner in putting up the Lola Masing Center last year (hey, there's a story on this at the Inquirer of March 8, 2008), who accompanied Rie Arima in this trip to Antique, the Lola Masing musical will be a big production in Japan, with three separate productions in Tokyo and two other cities, and each production having a cast of hundreds! Lola Masing is a star in Japan, actually. It seems the Japanese activists are using the Lola Masing platform to advance their cause for charter change, so that the Japanese government would acknowledge war crimes. I'll have to get more details on this production, and I hope we get to see it too, even from DVD.

In photo is Rie Arima, who is playing Lola Masing. She dropped by my office, although we did not meet because I was in Manila at the time of her visit, and left for me a t-shirt of the Lola Masing musical. The sewing machine (Lola Masing was a seamstress), was used as the central metaphor, which brings in a lot of texture in the play: Lola Masing sewing together pieces of her life, as she tells her story as comfort woman, and ironically, the machine as the mechanical metaphor of invasion and oppression experienced by Lola Masing.

Thanks for the t-shirt, Rie. How flattering that you would think I would fit in an XS size! Will raffle this off to the staff on Christmas, if I don't shrink at all.