The character sheet for The Terror: Infamy.
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Terminal Island Residents
Nakayama Family
Chester
Chester Nakayama
Portrayed By: Derek Mio
The main character of the series, Chester is a Nisei (second-generation Japanese-American) college student hoping to make a living as a professional photographer. Unfortunately for him, an unplanned pregnancy and the bombing of Pearl Harbor interfere with his plans, and then strange deaths begin to occur all around him.
- Calling the Old Man Out: He does this a few times, taking verbal potshots at what he perceives to be his father's cowardice and lack of ambition. Henry usually manages to give as good as he gets in these exchanges.
- Didn't Think This Through: Chester is well-meaning enough, but his impulsive behavior often gets him into trouble. A prime example is when he decides to steal his dad's Packard back from Grichuk, without considering that this might cause Grichuk to escalate his retaliation. He also tells his mother about Luz's pregnancy at literally the worst possible time and routinely lips off to people who can make his life a great deal harder with no thought for the potential consequences.
- Doom Magnet: Fumi Yoshida accuses him of being one, not without reason.
- Good-Looking Privates: Asako and Luz both believe he looks better in a uniform.
- Heroic BSoD: He enters one after learning about the deaths of his sons, and then another one upon finding out that his parents aren't his birth parents.
- Heroic Sacrifice: He tries to pull one off, offering himself to Yuko in exchange for his newborn son, but manages to find another option.
- Maligned Mixed Marriage: Chester and his Mexican-American girlfriend Luz are not married, but their relationship is nevertheless controversial, and the pregnancy that results from it is a major plot point.
- Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: He doesn't believe in any of the talk of bakemono or yurei that he hears at the beginning of the series, considering all of it to be "old-country superstition". This attitude doesn't last long.
- Sherlock Scan: When he's handed a letter written by a Japanese soldier as part of the test to see if he can qualify as a translator for the Army, he notices that it's A. written in the form of a poem, B. that the structure of the poem is unusual, and C. the reason for this is because the author encoded his current location in the first word of each line. The officer who handed him the letter is visibly impressed.
- Take Me Instead: Chester plans to give himself up to Yuko so she'll leave his and Luz's son alone. More specifically, his big plan is to kill himself then have Rocillo use her cuaranderismo magic to have Yuko take a child version of his spirit.
- Trading Bars for Stripes: He enlists in the Army to get out of the internment camp and start earning a real wage so that he can provide for Luz and his unborn child. He's also seeking to prove his loyalty to America.
Henry
Henry Nakayama
Portrayed By: Shingo Usami
Chester's father and Asako's husband. He's a fisherman who owns his own boat and has made his way in the world, despite the prejudice he faces as a first-generation Japanese immigrant. He and his son don't always see eye to eye, which is the source of much conflict between them.
- Cool Car: A brand-new Packard of which he is very proud. Only five other Issei men on Terminal Island have their own car.
- Driven to Suicide: Yuko forces him to kill himself after possessing him.
- Heroic Sacrifice: He attacks Yuko to keep Chester from pulling off his own heroic sacrifice, eventually dying via shotgun blast to the gut courtesy of Yuko.
- I Have No Son!: He finally gets fed up with Chester's thoughtlessness and rebellious actions and effectively disowns him about two-thirds of the way through the series. At the end of the series, though, he claims Chester as his own when confronting Yuko.
- Immigrant Parents: He's an Issei (first-generation Japanese-American) who is very proud to have made his own way in America.
- Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: He initially dismisses Asako's talk of bakemono and yurei as being things they left behind in Japan. It doesn't take him long to come around, though.
Asako
Asako Nakayama
Portrayed By: Naoko Mori
Henry's wife and Chester's mother.
- Bride and Switch: She secretly switched the names of the men she and Yuko were to marry upon finding out that Hideo Furuya was a cruel bastard.
- I Am Not Your Father: Asako is actually Chester's aunt, who adopted him after learning about Yuko's suicide.
- Immigrant Parents: She's an Issei (first-generation Japanese-American).
- I Regret Nothing: Asako says that she would switch papers with Yuko so she could avoid marrying Furuya again.
- Mama Bear: She never hesitates to defend Chester and slaps Fumi for getting on his case while he's grieving the deaths of his sons. She also goes absolutely apeshit on Yuko in the final episode for attacking her son, killing her husband, and trying to steal her grandson, stabbing her corpse over and over again while screaming at her to die.
Yamato-san
Nobuhiro Yamato
Portrayed By: George Takei
- Big Eater: He apparently polishes off an entire plate of sushi by himself in the last episode.
- Cool Old Guy: He's a respected elder who once killed a giant fish with one punch, knows how to deal with ghosts, and is played by George Takei.
- Meaningful Name: His surname, Yamato, is also a poetic name for the nation of Japan.
- Secret-Keeper: He tells Amy that he knows she killed Major Bowen, but since Bowen was a racist prick, he has no problem concealing the truth.
- You No Take Candle: His dialogue occasionally lapses into the trope.
Yoshida Family
Fumi
Fumi Yoshida
Portrayed By: Hira Ambrosino
- Kick the Dog: Fumi apparently thinks it's a good idea to reiterate to Chester that she thinks he's a Doom Magnet who will get them all killed while he's standing five feet away from the graves of his dead infant sons.
Walt
Walt Yoshida
Portrayed By: Lee Shorten
- Chest of Medals: Downplayed relative to most examples of the trope, but by the time Walt comes back to Colinas de Oro to recruit more men for the 442nd, he's already been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Bronze Star, the Combat Infantryman Badge, and two Purple Hearts.note
- Hero of Another Story: Halfway through the series, he enlists in the Army, goes to Europe with the 442nd RCT, and does well enough to be promoted to lieutenant and receive several awards for valor. All of this occurs offscreen.
Amy
Amy Yoshida
Portrayed By: Miki Ishikawa
- Sexy Secretary: Downplayed, as Amy never dresses or acts provocatively, but Bowen certainly thinks so, based on his behavior toward her.
- These Hands Have Killed: Amy is clearly distraught by having killed Major Bowen, to the point where she disengages from her family and becomes a Kerouac-esque beatnik.
- Walking the Earth: After the war is over, she becomes a beatnik and starts roaming across America, as she is still haunted by having killed Major Bowen.
Other Residents
Furuya
Hideo Furuya
Portrayed By: Eiji Inoue
- Asshole Victim: Besides his abuse of his late wife, he also reneged on a promise to marry Yuko after finding out that she was pregnant, forcing her to give up her child for adoption, thus setting off the sequence of events that turned her into a yurei.
- Blinded by the Sun: Yuko forces him to look directly into the sun, causing him to become blind.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Yuko chews his tongue out, then lets him drown in his own blood.
- Domestic Abuse: Was said to have been violent towards his late wife.
- Eye Scream: Yuko blinds him by forcing him to look directly at the sun.
- Tongue Trauma: Yuko kills him by kissing him and chewing his tongue off from the inside of his mouth.
U.S. Army
Major Bowen
Major Hallowell Bowen
Portrayed By: C. Thomas Howell
The commandant of the Colinas de Oro War Relocation Center.
- Asshole Victim: After having been a racist, sexist Jerkass throughout the entire series, it's pretty hard to feel any pity for him when Amy busts a chair across his head and drowns him in a mud puddle.
- Dirty Old Man: He likes to invade Amy's personal space, gives her flowers, and generally talks about how good she is compared to the other internees.
- Fallen Hero: He served in WWI and fought in the Battle of the Belleau Wood, and now he's a corrupt, dickish concentration camp commandant.
- Faux Affably Evil: He likes to put on the facade of being a kind and reasonable authority figure, but his racism, sexism, and resentment toward the internees are all boiling just beneath the surface, and it doesn't take much for the mask to slip.
- I Have You Now, My Pretty: After he drugs Amy and ties her up in the basement of a disused building, his behavior toward her throughout the entire scene just screams this trope.
- Jerkass: He's a racist, sexist, overbearing asshole who openly resents having been put in charge of Colinas de Oro and takes it out on the internees, who have no choice but to accept his abuse.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: He manages to pull this when Amy sends the tape of him boasting about murdering her boyfriend to the WRC. It winds up in the hands of one of his old Army buddies, who tips him off and buries the tape.
- Yank the Dog's Chain: He lets Amy believe that he might be lenient with Ken for holding him hostage to demand medical treatment for the sick internees, then orders his soldiers to shoot him out of hand.
Colonel Stallings
Colonel Stallings
Portrayed By: Reed Diamond
Chester's commanding officer in the Army.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: He backs Chester and Arthur to the hilt, defending them against racist abuse from other soldiers and Marines and cheerfully bragging about how valuable they are to the war effort. He even lets Chester skate on freeing Ota; though it's strongly implied that Stallings knows Chester is lying about what happened, he accepts Chester's version of events without much question and congratulates him on getting information out of the man.
Sergeant Crittenden
Sergeant Crittenden
Portrayed By: Josh Hudnuk
- Brainwashed and Crazy: Whatever the Japanese did to him, it's thoroughly broken his mind.
- Madness Mantra: "You are a white devil. We kill white devils."
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's never made clear whether his barbecuing the Marines who were assaulting Chester with a flamethrower was the result of his brainwashing at the hands of the Japanese or being possessed by Yuko.
- Nothing Is Scarier: We never do find out exactly what the Japanese did to Crittenden, which somehow makes it so much worse.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: He disappears from the story after killing the other Marines, with no word as to his ultimate fate.
Others
Luz
Luz Ojeda
Portrayed By: Cristina Rodlo
Chester's girlfriend and eventual wife, a young Mexican-American woman who is studying to become a nurse.
- All of the Other Reindeer: She's subjected to this in Colinas de Oro, being the only non-Japanese internee. The other women in her barracks talk about her behind her back and call her a whore to her face (not that she can understand them), and Henry wants nothing to do with her.
- Despair Event Horizon: She hits hers after her sons die in childbirth; she wanders around the camp in a haze of grief and depression, rooting around in streams and mud and refusing to talk to anyone.
- Ethereal White Dress: After the death of her sons, she wanders around the camp in a white dress, barely able to function. The kids in the camp start calling her the "ghost woman".
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Played totally straight. She takes the abortifacient from Chester, but eventually decides not to use it.
- Hospital Hottie: Downplayed, but Cristina Rodlo is certainly easy on the eyes, and Luz is training to be a nurse.
- Imperiled in Pregnancy: Poor Luz has to deal with a vengeful, monomaniacal yurei trying to steal her babies.
- That Man Is Dead: After enduring the trauma of a double stillbirth, she bitterly tells Chester that the girl he fell in love with is dead.
Ogawa
Arthur Ogawa
Portrayed By: Marcus Toji
Chester's fellow translator on Guadalcanal.
- Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: He doesn't believe in bakemono or yurei. Unfortunately for him, they're very real.
- Satellite Character: He's mostly there to give Chester someone to talk to during his stint in the Army, so he doesn't get much development or backstory.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: A very prominent example. Yuko possesses Arthur and uses him to force Chester to steal a jeep at gunpoint, only for the other soldiers to fire on them and cause the jeep to crash. Even though this event should have had major consequences for him, Arthur completely disappears from the story afterward.
Yuko
Yuko Tanabe
Portrayed By: Kiki Sukezane
A mysterious young woman who is much more than she seems.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. Over the course of the series, she gets progressively more battered and bedraggled. By the end of the season, she is a walking corpse covered in stolen skin, with visible stitch marks under her makeup. Her once-white kimono is filthy and tattered, and she's ripped all the flesh off her left cheek to get rid of the binding sutras Henry wrote there.
- Body Horror: She is a revenant who's been buried in a pauper's grave for two decades, and looks it. She twitches and jerks her broken, rotting body around like a marionette, bending her spine and limbs in ways no human body was ever meant to bend. At one point, she possesses a mortician and forces him to stitch fresh skin onto her corpse.
- Demonic Possession: Her typical modus operandi over the course of the series. By the end of the last episode, she's possessed damn near every main character and more than a few secondary ones.
- Dressing to Die: Yuko dresses in her kimono and fixes her hair when she prepares to bury herself.
- Driven to Suicide: After being forced to surrender her sons to an orphanage, she fills her sling with rocks and jumps off a bridge.
- Ethereal White Dress: She is a vengeful ghost who often appears in a white kimono.
- Flesh Golem: Yuko possesses a doctor to put her body back together using skin from other bodies after the Nakayamas try to burn her body in episode 6.
- Food Chains: Averted. Yuko eats food in the afterlife, but manages to escape anyway.
- Glamour Failure: Though she often appears as she did prior to her suicide in 1920, there are times when she reverts to her "normal" appearance, that of a rotting, long-dead corpse. It's unclear whether she's projecting some kind of illusion or using stolen skin to hide her grisly appearance, as she does in episode 7.
- Implacable Woman: As a bakemono or yurei, she cannot be put down by conventional means. Her physical self might take damage, but eventually she will return.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: She is Chester's birth mother. And also Asako's sister.
- My Secret Pregnancy: Yuko reveals that she's pregnant after marrying Furuya in 1919. Justified in that she thought hiding it and going to America was her best chance.
- Replacement Goldfish: Yuko intends for Luz's twins, Enrique and Hikaru, to replace her own, Jirou and Taizo (Chester).
- Revenant Zombie: The series's take on the yurei makes her one.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: She's determined to kill anyone who was remotely involved in the chain of events that led her to surrendering her twins and committing suicide. Mr. and Mrs. Furuya, Yoshida, Asako, and Henry all wind up in her crosshairs.
- Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: At first, she's pretty well-kept. However, as her already-decaying body is subjected to repeated abuse over the course of the series, she eventually deteriorates into a classic example of the trope.
- Tragic Monster: Yuko is Chester's biological mother, and she only wants to live in a perfect world with her son(s).
- Trauma Conga Line: Poor Yuko gets walloped by the trope. First she becomes pregnant by a soldier who dies in battle shortly thereafter. When she reveals her pregnancy to her arranged husband Hideo Furuya, he calls her a whore and throws her out onto the streets in a rage. A year later, she is living on the streets and eating garbage to survive. She realizes she can't take care of her twin sons and is forced to give them up to an orphanage. She commits suicide in a fit of despair and ends up as a yurei, a vengeful spirit that will never rest. Then her own son rejects her and tries to destroy her physical body. Then her sister angrily tells her that she wouldn't hesitate to switch husbands with her again, even knowing everything that's happened to Yuko, and finally she starts stabbing the hell out of Yuko's body while screaming at her to die. Indeed a Fate Worse than Death.
- Vengeful Ghost: Yuko is out to avenge herself on everyone who had anything to do with her humiliation and suicide.
- Walking Spoiler: In case, you hadn't noticed, it is really hard to discuss Yuko without spoiling the entire series.
- White and Red and Eerie All Over: Whenever she wears her white kimono, it's paired with red embroidering and bright red lipstick that makes for an unsettling and suggestive contrast. Best exemplified in the scene where she kills Furuya.
- Woman Scorned: She was Hideo's picture bride, but was pregnant when she met him, and thus he threw her out of his house in a drunken rage. She was left homeless and penniless, eventually forcing her to give up her children for adoption. After coming back from the dead, she takes her revenge on him.
