What caused Peggy Hull (chapter 1) to change her opinion about war correspondence?
What was one particular reason Peggy Hull (chapter 1) was hoping to travel with the planned ground invasion of the Japanese home islands?
Why wasn’t Elizabeth MacDonald’s Pearl Harbor report (chapter 4) published at the time she wrote it?
Explain how the “black propaganda” Elizabeth MacDonald created (chapter 4) may have affected the outcome of the fighting in the Burma campaign.
How did Claire Phillips (chapter 8) improve the relief work Margaret Utinsky had started (chapter 6)? Why did both of these women take on false identities?
Why was Sybil Kathigasu’s husband (chapter 10) initially reluctant to operate on a wounded guerrilla?
Why didn’t Sybil Kathigasu (chapter 10) take the guerrilla’s offer to escape certain arrest?
Why were there so many Chinese guerrillas in Malaya (chapter 10)?
Why didn’t Elizabeth Choy (chapter 11) recommend any Kempeitai officers for the death penalty?
Why did Vivian Bullwinkel’s fellow nurses (chapter 12) in the internment camp keep her survival story a secret?
Why was the vocal orchestra in chapter 13 not simply called a choir?
What was the Japanese reaction to the vocal orchestra?
Explain how the Bataan Death March initiated and energized the Filipino resistance.
What major decision was made at the Arcadia Conference (chapter 5), and why were the Bataan defenders not told about it?
Explain how the Rescission Act (chapter 7) motivated Yay Panlilio to gear her memoir toward American readers.
Why do you think Filipino guerrilla leader Marking (chapter 7) was initially hostile to the idea of working with the Americans?
In chapter 5, why were the Japanese surprised to encounter American nurses at Corregidor?
Why is it remarkable that the nurses at Bataan and Corregidor (chapter 5) performed so well under fire?
Why do you think the Japanese singled out Chinese civilians living in such places as Malaya (chapter 10) and Singapore (chapter 11) for particularly cruel treatment?
Why was Jane Kendeigh (chapter 14) photographed so much during the war? How did she react to her sudden fame?
Discuss why Jane Kendeigh’s landing on a battlefield (chapter 14) was celebrated but Dickey Chapelle’s (chapter 15) was not.
Explain how the Pearl Harbor attack led to Executive Order #9066, imprisoning all West Coast Japanese Americans.
Explain precisely how Executive Order #9066 denied West Coast Japanese Americans their constitutional rights.
How did the fighting on Iwo Jima and Okinawa directly affect the way in which the war ended?
Read The Flamboya Tree: A Family’s War-Time Courage by Clara Olink Kelly and I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust by Livia Bitton-Jackson. How were the camps for women run by the German SS different from those run by the Japanese military ? How were they the same?
Read Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Prison Camps by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald and The Flamboya Tree: A Family’s War-Time Courage by Clara Olink Kelly. Compare and contrast the experiences of Mary and Clara and explain how their mothers helped them cope.
Compare the memoirs of the following Japanese Americans: Mary Matsuda Gruenewald in Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Prison Camps and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston in Farewell to Manzanar. How did their fathers make a difference, for good or bad, in their experiences?
Compare and contrast the experiences and reportage of World War II correspondents Dickey Chapelle (chapter 15); Margaret Bourke-White (Reporting Under Fire: 16 Daring Women War Correspondents and Photojournalists); and Martha Gellhorn (Reporting Under Fire and Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance, and Rescue). How did these correspondents overcome the gender-based hurdles placed in their way?
Explain specifically how being an entertainer facilitated the work of the following wartime spies: Claire Phillips (chapter 8) and Josephine Baker (The Many Faces of Josephine Baker: Dancer, Singer, Activist, Spy).
Compare and contrast the experiences of the following US military nurses: Jane Kendeigh (chapter 14) and Muriel Engelman (Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance, and Rescue).
Virginia Hall and Marlene Dietrich (Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Sabotage, Espionage, Resistance, and Rescue) and Elizabeth MacDonald McIntosh (chapter 4), all worked for the OSS during World War II. Compare and contrast their specific work.
Read the imprisonment portion of Unbroken (The Young Adult Adaptation): An Olympian’s Journey from Airman to Castaway to Captive by Laura Hillenbrand, especially pages 171–224. Compare and contrast the experiences of Louis Zamperini with that of the imprisoned women in this book, especially Sybil Kathigasu (chapter 10).
How did Fascism—a single-party political system intolerant of dissention—differ in Japan and Germany during World War II? Discuss the causes of its growth in each nation, how it was implemented, and how/why Fascism propelled both nations to initiate war.
How did Germany’s invasion of Western Europe in the spring of 1940 affect the Japanese government?
Explain how the Tripartite Pact was a direct warning to the United States to remain neutral in the war.
Compare and contrast the Japanese Kempeitai with the German Gestapo.
Every German student must learn about Hitler and Nazism while Japanese students learn very little about their nation’s role in the war. Why?
Why did the Japanese military not adhere to the Geneva Convention as regards treatment of POWs?
Explain how racism was the foundation for how Japanese soldiers treated their fellow Asians.
What major issue caused offense to the Japanese delegates during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919?
Why did Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere at first sound like a good idea to Asians in the Far East? Was it a lie, or do you think the Japanese truly believed their Asian neighbors would be better off under their domination?
Why do you think students outside of Asia learn more about the Nazi Holocaust than they do about Pacific War events such as the Nanking Massacre?
Why do you think the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which killed approximately 200,000 people, both civilians and military personnel) are more well known than the US firebombing raids on Japan (which killed approximately 300,000 civilians), or the US and British attacks on Germany (which killed approximately 300,000 civilians)?
Watch the following films: The Great Escape (NR) and Unbroken (PG-13). How were the experiences of Allied POWs, as presented in these films, different in the Pacific War from in the war in Europe? How were they similar?
Because there is no Japanese resister section in this book, you might wonder if there were any Japanese people who tried to work against their wartime government as some Germans did during the Nazi regime. There were some anti-Fascist Japanese, but they were relatively few in number and their memoirs and biographies are even fewer, for reasons I mention in the epilogue.
If you are curious about this topic, however, I found a few English-language books that might be of interest. Japan at War: An Oral History describes multiple instances of Japanese people whose thought patterns—and sometimes even their actions—were out of step with the rest of Japanese wartime society.
Restless Wave: My Life in Two Worlds is the fictionalized memoir of Ayako Ishigaki, a young woman who eventually moved to the United States in order to work against the Japanese military regime. Her memoir doesn’t cover this period in her life—it ends before Japan’s full military involvement in the Far East—but it is still a fascinating glimpse of Japanese culture from the viewpoint of an independently thinking young woman.
The New Sun and Horizon Is Calling are two autobiographical picture books—a few words and a line drawing on each page—geared for teens and written by Atsushi Iwamatsu (pen name Taro Yashima). They relate the story of Atsushi and his wife, Tomoe Sasako. This couple protested the Fascist Japanese government during the 1930s, were mistreated and imprisoned by the Kempeitai, and fled together to the United States in 1939. These two books can be difficult to find but are well worth the effort if you can get help from your librarian.
One last book I found on this topic is Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring. It details the inner workings of a Soviet espionage network in Japan that involved a number of Japanese Communists, a few of them women.