Original air date: 6/1/2011
Butters is misdiagnosed with multiple personality disorder, while Mr. Lu Kim takes on a sushi restaurant that opens next door to City Wok.
"City Sushi" contains examples of:
- A Day in the Limelight: Notably for Butters. None of the main boys have lines in this episode.
- Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop: Sergeant Yates convinces Linda and Stephen to ground Butters when Lu Kim beats up Takiyama and when Dr. Janus kidnaps him and forces him to rob a jewelry store.
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Butters decides to discard his extra identities, noting: "No more Postman Butters, no more Inspector Butters, no more Porn Star Butters..."
- The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: Dr. Janus misdiagnosed Butters with multiple personality disorder, yet unaware that he suffers the disorder himself.
- Driven to Suicide: Takayama jumps off a tower to his death out of shame after mistaking a Caucasian man for a Chinese man.
- Foreshadowing: A hawk-eyed viewer might notice a discriminatory sign in the sushi restaurant saying management has the right to deny service to Chinese people, but the owner is initially happy to serve Lu Kim. Sure enough, it turns out Lu Kim isn't actually Chinese.
- Gaslighting: Dr. Janus does this (perhaps inadvertently) to Butters, convincing him that he's going through a personality disorder.Dr. Janus: Butters, what are you doing? What is that? A blowtorch? Put that down! You're having another episode!
- Interchangeable Asian Cultures: A Japanese sushi restaurant opens next door to City Wok. The residents of the town refer to both restaurants as "Chinese" — and to the area where both restaurants are situated as "Little Tokyo" — much to the frustration of the owners.
- Japanese Ranguage: Mr. Lu Kim and the City Sushi owner each complain about not being able to understand the accent of the other, although it's not clear how much of it is them just trying to insult each other on purpose.
- Meaningful Name: Butters is diagnosed with multiple personality disorder by the psychiatrist Dr. Janus, named for the two-faced Roman god of transitions.
- Misplaced Retribution: Stephen and Linda ground Butters twice for the actions of Lu Kim/Dr. Janus, both when Sergeant Yates convinced them that Butters was the one responsible.
- Never My Fault: Stephen doesn't know what is wrong with his son, but he knows it isn't him because he believes his parenting skills are awesome.
- Psycho Psychologist: The psychiatrist turns out to be both insane and abusive to Butters.
- Room Full of Crazy: Butters finds a room covered with pictures of the sushi chef (Tuong Lu Kim's "enemy") with the word "Kill" scrawled in red paint over them.
- Shout-Out: The ending of the episode is a South Park Shot-for-Shot Remake of the end of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
- Skewed Priorities: The police are okay with leaving Dr. Janus' mental illness untreated as long as City Wok, the only Asian restaurant in town, remains in business.
- Split-Personality Takeover: The police allow Dr. Janus to keep on thinking he's Lu Kim, since Lu Kim owns the only Asian restaurant in town.
- Status Quo Is God: The police wonder if the town really needs another therapist and decide to just let Dr. Janus keep believing he's a Chinese man.
- Stop Being Stereotypical: The City Sushi owner commits ritual suicide out of his great shame for being naive and being fooled into thinking a Caucasian person pretending to be Chinese was actually Chinese so easily. As he's falling to his death, he berates himself for being stereotypical.
- Unintelligible Accent: Spoofed. Lu Kim and Junichi Takiyama both speak English, but have a Chinese and Japanese accent respectively, meaning neither of them can understand the other one.Lu Kim: What's the big idea putting your City Sushi right next to my City Wok?!
Mr. Takiyama: I'm sorry I do not understand your accent. You want a city tuna roll?
Lu Kim: No I don't want city tuna roll! I want you to go find another shitty town to open your City Sushi please!
Mr. Takiyama: Why don't you please just speak English? Maybe I can understand you!
Lu Kim: I am speaking English! Why don't you speak a fucking English, you soba eating fuck! - Wham Shot: Butters seeing the wall in Dr. Janus' room covered with articles on City Sushi and vandalism of anti-Japanese rhetoric, signifying that "the mean man" personality inside of Janus that was said to be mysteriously getting stronger and more dominant lately is in fact Lu Kim, which gets revealed immediately after.Lu Kim: They wanna take over my City Wok?!
