75 years later, Japanese Americans recall pain of internment camps

Members of the Japanese Independent Congregational Church, attending Easter services prior to evacuation of persons of Japanese ancestry, pose for a portrait in Oakland, April 1942. Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Joyce Nakamura Okazaki was 7 years old in 1942 when her family left their Los Angeles home and reported to a World War Two internment camp for Japanese Americans in California's remote desert.

She recalls crowded rooms filled with cots and embarrassment that the toilets at Manzanar War Relocation Center had no privacy. "Like Nazi Germany, we Japanese Americans were put into concentration camps," said Okazaki, now 82, while recognising that detainees were not killed or tortured.