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Manzanar: A Site of Conscience

On Sunday, 7 December 1941, Mary Tsukamoto abruptly stopped practicing the piano for her church’s upcoming Christmas programmed when she heard the news: Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, the US naval base in Hawai’i. ‘The whole world turned dark,’ she recalled. At the same time, Tom Kawaguchi left a public library in San Francisco, a city in the American state of California. On the way home, Tom feared that bystanders were ‘ready to pounce’ on him. In the days that followed, all people of Japanese ancestry living in the US came under suspicion. Many politicians, military leaders and ordinary citizens believed that Japanese Americans would side with their country of ancestry, Japan, rather than their country of birth, America. Mary Tsukamoto and Tom Kawasaki were just two of nearly 112,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast whose lives would be forever altered.

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan the next day and on Germany and Italy three days later. Then, on 19 February 1942 he signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the US military to carry out the exclusion and detention of American citizens and resident foreigners. Many people had been persuaded that collaboration from within was responsible for Japan’s success at Pearl Harbor. California Attorney General Earl Warren and other politicians claimed that the proximity of Japanese-owned farms to airstrips, harbors and train tracks was proof of intended sabotage, even though these farms had been established decades earlier. In mid-1942, all of California’s congressmen stated their unequivocal support for removal and internment. Although Executive Order 9066 did not specify any ethnic group by name, in practice it applied to individual Germans and Italians without legal citizenship—and to all people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast.

The US government thus ordered over 110,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry to leave their homes in California and parts of other US states. Under the guise of ‘military necessity’, the US Army established ten military-style camps to house the people in remote areas, under guard, for the duration of the war. One of the camps was at Manzano, in the Owens Valley of eastern California. At Manzano, more than ten thousand people spent up to three years behind barbed wire simply because of their ancestry.

The Owens Valley Reception Centre became the Manzano War Relocation Centre on 1 June 1942, and reached its peak population of 10,046 in September of the same year. With food, housing, healthcare and a clothing allowance provided by the War Relocation Authority, family life continued, albeit under stark conditions. Room assignments kept families together, but they were often required to live with strangers to achieve a total of eight people per room. Privacy was scarce. Rosie Maruki Kakuuchi, a teenager at Manzano, found using the toilets and showers with no partitions particularly ’embarrassing, humiliating and degrading.’

Manzano changed substantially between the day it opened in March 1942 and the day it closed in November 1945. The incarcerated transformed the landscape with ponds and gardens. Families welcomed babies and mourned deaths. Schools educated students, internal security helped prevent crime and the fire department extinguished fires. Japanese Americans even organised recreational activities at Manzano. In its first anniversary issue, the Manzano Free Press published an anonymous poem about the complexity of life at Manzano: ‘Out of smiles and curses, of tears and cries, forlorn; Mixed with broken laughter, forced because they must . . . Out on the desert’s bosom—a new town is born.’

After the war, some Japanese Americans protested the internment by pursuing court cases. But the vast majority did not want to ‘make waves’ as they rebuilt their lives. Much later, in 1981, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) listened to over 750 individual testimonies of survivors of the camps. The CWRIC recommended that the US government make monetary reparations and issue a formal letter of apology. Nearly forty years after the forced relocation and internment of Japanese Americans, the CWRIC concluded, ‘Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity. . . . The broad historical causes that shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.’

Adapted from the National Park Service, ‘Manzano: A Site of Conscience’

What is the main focus of the text?

• how the attack on Pearl Harbor led to war against Japan
• the history of the internment of Japanese Americans, with a focus on Manzano
• how Japanese Americans adjusted to everyday life at Manzano
• the history of injustices against Japanese Americans, including internment at Manzano

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Claims About Cocoa

Chocolate is often used in decadent desserts, but scientists have been trying to determine if chocolate also has health benefits and what those benefits might be. The idea that chocolate might be good for you stems from studies of the Guna, a group of people who live on islands off the coast of Panama. They have a low risk of cardiovascular disease or high blood pressure given their weight and salt intake. Researchers realized that genes weren’t the reason: those who moved away from the islands developed high blood pressure and heart disease at typical rates. Something in their island environment must have kept their blood pressure from rising.

‘What was particularly striking about their environment was the amount of cocoa they consume, which was easily ten times more than most of us would get in a typical day,’ says Dr Brent M. Egan, researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina who studies the effect of chocolate on blood pressure.

But the cocoa of the Guna is a far cry from the chocolate that most of us eat. The Guna make a drink with dried, ground cocoa beans (the seeds of the cocoa tree) with a little added sweetener. The chocolate we tend to eat, on the other hand, is made from cocoa beans that are roasted and processed in various other ways, and then combined with ingredients like whole milk.

Processing can extract two main components from cocoa beans: cocoa solids and cocoa butter. Powdered cocoa is made using the solids. Chocolate is made from a combination of cocoa solids and cocoa butter. The color of the chocolate depends partly on the amount of cocoa solids and added ingredients, such as milk. In general, though, the darker the chocolate, the more cocoa solids it contains. Researchers think the solids are where the healthy compounds are.

Over the years there have been many studies on the health effects of chocolate. ‘We have good science on chocolate, especially about dark chocolate on blood pressure,’ says Dr Luc Djoussé of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His research team found an overall drop in blood pressure among people who eat more chocolate. ‘The results suggest that chocolate may, in fact, lower blood pressure,’ Djoussé says. ‘This effect was even stronger among people with high blood pressure to begin with.’

Laboratory studies have uncovered several mechanisms that might explain chocolate’s benefits for heart health. However, it’s hard to prove if the chocolate that most Americans eat actually has those effects on the human body. Controlling how much chocolate people eat and tracking them over long periods is not an easy task.

‘The clinical trials that have been done in people have all been fairly short,’ says Dr Ranganath Muniyappa, a staff clinician at America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) who studies diabetes and cardiovascular health. These studies, he explains, look at cardiovascular risk ‘markers’—factors related to heart health, such as blood pressure—but not actual long-term outcomes like heart disease and stroke.

Chocolate contains high levels of compounds thought to help prevent cancer, too. But Dr Joseph Su, an NIH expert in diet and cancer, says that direct evidence for this is similarly hard to come by. Since cancer can take many years to develop, it’s difficult to prove that eating chocolate can affect the disease. Instead, researchers look to see if factors linked to cancer change when chocolate is consumed.

‘Right now, some studies show really a remarkable modification of those markers,’ Su says. But the evidence that chocolate can reduce cancer or death rates in people is still weak. ‘There are a few studies that show some effect,’ Su says, ‘but the findings so far are not consistent.’

What might be responsible for many of chocolate’s beneficial effects? Scientists believe it might be compounds called flavanols, which are also found in tea, wine, fruits and vegetables. Different chocolates can vary greatly in their flavanol content. Cocoa beans naturally differ in their flavanol levels. A large portion of flavanols may also be removed during processing. In fact, companies often remove these compounds intentionally because of their bitter taste. The end result is that there’s no way to know if the chocolate products you’re looking at contain high flavanol levels.

Although studies of flavanol are promising, scientists agree that you shouldn’t increase your chocolate intake just yet. ‘The science doesn’t allow us to make recommendations because the evidence is just not there,’ says Muniyappa.

Adapted from NIH News in Health, ‘Claims About Cocoa’

What is the main focus of the text?

• how chocolate should be processed in order to maximise the health benefits
• the numerous health benefits of chocolate and how to achieve them
• why dark chocolate offers greater health benefits than other kinds of chocolate
• the potential health benefits of chocolate and their likely causes