Lily Fujimoto Taka

Reading the Walls Oral History Interview Lesson 1: Lily Fujimoto Taka

In the spring of 1942, just months after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, every Japanese and Japanese American resident of Riverside, California was uprooted from their home and incarcerated in remote camps scattered across the western and southwestern states. The Riverside Metropolitan Museum has documented the personal recollections and collected artifacts from Riverside’s Japanese American community, focusing specifically on the Harada, Inaba, and Fujimoto families.

Lily Fujimoto Taka is being interviewed by Allison Campbell, former Education Curator of the Riverside Metropolitan Museum. Lily Fujimoto was pregnant with her first child when she was relocated with her family to Poston, Arizona. She left Poston and moved with her husband, brother and daughter to Des Moines, Iowa, before returning to Riverside in the 1980’s.

This is one of several oral history interviews from the Reading the Walls Curriculum. For more information, visit www.riversideca.gov/museum.