Third grade teacher Tony Osumi says he, like a lot of Americans, watched the recent news from the Southern US border with growing dismay. The images and sounds of wailing children being pulled from their tearful parents' arms and taken away to temporary shelters made him wince—and reminded him of the first day of school for children who hadn't been before. "It's hard enough when parents drop off kids for the first time and seeing that,"says Osumi, who teaches in Los Angeles. But this was so much worse: In Osumi's school, the new students would be retrieved at the end of the day, and returned home to be quizzed and comforted by their parents. There was no such assurance for children at the border. "It's heartbreaking," he sighs. Flashbacks to a traumatic time The border separations also reminded him of something less benign: the separations many Japanese American families on the West Coast experienced in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the initial days after the attack,
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