By Ruth Ford — Correspondent
Making history can be hard. Repeating it can be, too.
When father and daughter team Tim and Lili Nagaoka set out last July to make a YouTube series about notable sites in colonial Concord and beyond, Nagaoka had hoped the project would add some educational value to his daughter’s social media stream.
Complete with a map outlining the historic places and the old-fashioned countdown beeps of old films, “Lili’s History Tour” could almost be considered a low-key demo for any parent hoping to hold back the tide of social media effluence.
Lili wasn’t sure what she thought, but she definitely didn’t think it would be as hard as it was to get all the facts right… And to walk around all day in the hot sun.
“It looks like it’s easy, but it’s not!” says Lili, who had just finished second grade at Willard Elementary School when she and her dad embarked on their summer of reenactment.
The tour is born
In July and August, the Nagaoka team shot 40 10-second videos highlighting key facts about colonial Concord and some surrounding towns. The series took a lot more effort than either of them had anticipated.
It was hot. There was a ton of walking. At times the young star was overwhelmed with all the memorizing she had to do.
“Definitely, this project had a lot of sweat and tears involved,” says Nagaoka. “We went to eight or nine locations a day, and at each location, we would have four or five takes.”
Though he would coach Lili carefully on what each location was about, it was up to her to memorize the key facts and recite them for the cameras.
“She would get frustrated,” her dad acknowledges.
But in the finished product, the young star looks poised and thoughtful, and the series has a homespun appeal that makes it all look easy.
With her long brown hair tucked into a bonnet and a white shawl over a blue Martha Washington-style dress, Lili leads viewers on a fast survey of life in old Concord from Walden Pond to Monument Square to the North Bridge, “where the colonials pushed back the British for the first time,” she recites, standing next to the historical bridge.
Will work for ice cream
For a just-turned-8-year-old, memorizing 40 facts about Massachusetts was not a small feat, even with the promise of a treat at the end.
“At the beginning, she was really tired,” Nagaoka admits. “Sometimes I had to bribe her with an ice cream when she was done.” But now that the series has garnered a little buzz, his daughter is proud of the work she has done.
“I feel good. I feel happy,” Lili says when asked what she thinks about the YouTube series now. “I told some of my friends. They just said, ‘Wow.’”
Nagaoka said that although the goal was to elevate what his daughter was watching online — “most of it was kids playing with toys or mothers making lunches” — his wife, Kaiko Kunii, was initially skeptical.
“She said I was like Hollywood parents that try to live off the glory of their kids,” he laughs.
Still, the series has given Nagaoka a renewed respect for his daughter’s abilities. And with Lili back in school, and back to her beloved comic books, her dad has promised to figure out how to increase the number of views on their YouTube series and start editing their latest cooking video.
A highlight of this fall for Lili: She, her parents, and their two dogs were going out for Halloween dressed as Demon Slayer, Lili’s favorite manga character.
Says the YouTube star: “If you give me a comic, I’m happy!”
Check out Lili’s series at youtube.com/@lilishistorytour.
