MATSUDO, Chiba Prefecture--A second-generation Japanese-American painter recently self-published a Japanese edition of her memoir about living in wartime internment camps as a child in the United States.

“The painful thing about being in the camps was losing friends, family time and freedom,” said Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey, 90, who lives in the U.S. state of Utah. “I think it was very wrong for the U.S. government to set up camps based on race. I just hope that this will never be repeated.”

The Japanese version of “Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp: A Nisei Youth Behind a World War II Fence” was released in October.

“Nisei,” the word in the title, is Japanese for “second generation.”

According to the book, Havey was born in the United States and lived in California with her parents and older brother.

The family was poor but had a stable income after her parents--a gardener and a dressmaker--started working for an affluent couple named Harrington.

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order in February 1942 to forcibly relocate Japanese descendants, or nikkei, from the U.S. west coast to inland areas.

Havey was around 10 when she and her family were sent to the Santa Anita Assembly Center, an internment camp in California. Her family was assigned the code number 18286 and detained in the camp enclosed by barbed wire.

They ate with other internees in a mess hall, and a watchtower searchlight shone on windows at the camp during the night.

When Havey left her barracks one night to go to a latrine several blocks away, the searchlight followed her, and she trembled from fear.

“When I got out of the bathroom, the light shone on me, too, and I was scared that the soldiers would shoot me,” she recalled.

She also saw a soldier train a gun on a boy who had approached the barbed wire.

The detainees repeatedly said “shikataganai” (you can’t do anything about it) and “gaman” (be patient) to force back their pent-up emotions.

Havey’s family was later moved to the Grenada War Relocation Center, a permanent internment camp better known as Camp Amache, in a Colorado desert.

“I was envious of the wild rabbits freely jumping over the barbed wire,” she says in her book.

She lived in the internment camps for almost four years before moving to Utah after the war ended.

Havey told The Asahi Shimbun that she learned in the 1980s that Vietnam War veterans who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder were receiving music and art therapy.

She suspected she also had PTSD because she suffered anxiety attacks caused by closed spaces, bright lights and loud noise.

Havey took to painting to help deal with her trauma. Many of her works showed convoluted combinations of objects, including blood-red searchlights, watchtowers and barbed wire.

At the request of museum officials, Havey wrote short descriptions to go with her works that were displayed at exhibitions.

But she realized that single paragraphs could not provide a full account of her experiences.

Havey compiled stories she had jotted down and published them in an English-language memoir with pictures in 2014.

She visited Japan in 2016 and gave talks in Wakayama, Hiroshima, Tokyo and Kyoto prefectures about her experiences. Her father was from Wakayama Prefecture and her mother hailed from Hiroshima Prefecture.

Among other destinations, Havey fondly remembers a visit to Miyoshi, Hiroshima Prefecture, where she spoke before high school students.

However, Havey said she was surprised to learn that few Japanese knew about the internment of Japanese-Americans. She also felt that elderly Japanese were reluctant to talk about the issue.

“Perhaps some of them have a sense of guilt, thinking that Japanese-Americans were interned because Japan attacked Pearl Harbor,” a cousin who lives in Japan told her.

Havey said she thought that Japanese wanted to erase the history of nikkei.

She published the Japanese edition to tell people in Japan what a young Japanese-American girl lived through in the camps.

“Many of Lily’s paintings are gloomy, but she is cheerful in her text,” said Yoriko Takasaku, a resident of Matsudo, Chiba Prefecture, who translated the book. “That cheerfulness contains deep sorrow and pain. It’s like hearing the cries of Lily’s heart.”

The book is available at Amazon.com.