Recap / Cold Case S 5 E 11 Family 8108

The team reinvestigate the murder of Ray Takahashi, a Japanese-American citizen who died at the Army-Navy baseball game in 1945, shortly after being released from Manzanar, where he may have made an enemy or two.

Tropes:

• Accidental Murder: The Victim of the Week falls down some stairs after being punched during an angry conversation.
• Broken Bird:
  • Billy became this after spending time in Manzanar and seeing his father with another woman. He went off to war to get away from the camp and his father, not because he had something to fight for. In fact, he felt like his home country had forsaken him.
    Billy: I have no home.
  • Ray finally broke when he found out Billy died in the war. He stopped believing in America, questioning the good in the country that hated his son and let him die.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • Billy when he thought his father was having an affair in the internment camp imprisoning and mistreating them.
  • Ray when he found out his son died fighting for a country who treated him like a criminal for his heritage.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Larry Scholz (the abusive guard) left Ray alone after seeing just how miserable his family situation was.
• Face–Heel Turn: Skips was Billy best friend, and never cared that he was Japanese until he went off to war and fought the Japanese forces, getting traumatized and creating new hatred for them, to the point where he scoffed at Billy’s death in the war and murdered his father.
• Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: The Takahashis used to own their own grocery store before they were interred. After moving to Philly, Ray has to start over by selling produce on the street.
• Hypocrite: A guard at the internment camp justifies locking up Japanese Americans by saying their ethnicity means it's in their nature to be loyal to the Japanese Emperor. When Billy notes that he has a German surname (its on his uniform's name tag) and sarcastically suggests he must be loyal to Hitler for the same reason, the guard gets very offended and gets rough with him for suggesting something so slanderous, obviously not getting the point of Billy's snark.
• Only Sane Man: Ray knew that letting Honor Before Reason guide his actions in Manzanar, where soldiers were waiting for him to attack to prove he was un-American, would only make a bad situation worse, and tried to make the best of a bad situation and seem like a good man and worthy of his American citizenship. Sadly, many of his fellow prisoners, even his family, saw this as him being naive and spineless.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Billy's parents were alive when he became a war casualty.
• Pet the Dog: Another inmate of the camp, Shinji Nakamura, didn't like Ray at all for his attitude in the camp and by his own admission, they were not friends. But he is the one who delivers to Ray the last letter Billy wrote to his father before he was killed. Shinji did that because they both have lost a son to the war.
• Staircase Tumble: Ray ends up dying this way, being shoved down the stairs by Skips and breaking his neck in the process.
• Stranger in a Familiar Land: Skips went into war a kind, upbeat kid who did not care about the Takahashis' Japanese heritage, and he returned from fighting the Japanese Empire as a cold, bitter man who laughed at Ray for wanting a posthumous medal for Billy, who had been Skips’ best friend before going to Manzanar.
• Trauma Conga Line: For Ray and his family. They are sent to the internment camp where they are mistreated and forced to live hand-to-mouth for many years, the Takahashi marriage begins to fail when his wife learns that she's pregnant at the worst possible time, their son Billy is drafted into the war and dies shortly after his sister is born, Ray loses his faith after learning this via telegram and he's then murdered by his son's best friend, who turned on him and other Japanese people after serving in the war.