ABSTRACT
The japanese peruvian oral history project (JPOHP) was established in 1991 by a group of Japanese Peruvians and their families who were interned in the United States US relocation camps during World War II. Their intention was to record and preserve the memory of their unjust deportation and internment, as well as aiming to educate themselves and the public about the Japanese Peruvians' wartime experiences, while also demanding justice and redress. Reading the oral practice of telling the past presented in Higa's Gaijin as a site of unauthorized popular culture can lead the reader to observe its resisting function that questions the unified collective memory of Japanese Peruvians constructed by the JPOHP. After the riot and looting, the already existing separation between the Japanese community and Nakandakari is further pronounced as a clear division between the victims who share the sufferings and the villain who takes advantage of anything even in the time of the calamity.
