Ryohei Higashikata

Diamond Is Unbreakable is the series' first Part organized around defending a *place* rather than completing a journey, and Ryohei's death is the foundation stone of that structure. He dies in Chapter 270 — barely five chapters into the arc — and his murder converts Josuke from a high-schooler with a healing Stand into Morioh's self-appointed guardian. The vow Josuke makes over his grandfather's body ("I'll protect this town in his place") is quoted by the narrative for the next hundred-plus chapters, from the hunt for Anjuro through the war against Kira.

Structurally, Ryohei plays the role George Joestar I played in Phantom Blood: the parent-figure whose death at a villain's hands brands the hero with purpose. Araki even rhymes the two deaths — both men are killed *at home*, by an enemy the family unknowingly invited inside.

Ryohei's biography is deliberately unglamorous. Born around 1944, he joined the Morioh police in 1964 and served thirty-five years — much of it on overnight bicycle patrol, a beat cop in a town small enough that he knew its criminals by name. He fathered Tomoko in 1962, raised her alone, and stayed on the force well past the age most officers retire to a desk.

One arrest defines the record: in 1976 he took in a twelve-year-old robber named Anjuro Katagiri. The boy grew into Morioh's worst serial criminal, gained a Stand from the Arrow, and came back in 1999 to settle the score. The irony is precise and cruel — the single best day of Ryohei's career, the day he took a predator off Morioh's streets, is the day that eventually kills him.

The manga gives Ryohei one scene that explains the whole household: a man Tomoko assaulted comes to the station to press charges, and Ryohei — upon realizing the culprit is his own daughter — quietly refuses to arrest her. It is played for warmth rather than corruption: a single father covering for the single mother he raised, in a family that closes ranks by instinct.

His relationship with Josuke runs on the same current. He jokes with the boy using a fake gun, tolerates the pompadour and the attitude, and functions as the only father figure Josuke has ever had — Joseph Joestar being, at that point, a name on a paternity report. When Josuke inherits anything from Ryohei, it is not blood (they are related through Tomoko) but *conduct*: the unshowy, daily, local protectiveness that distinguishes Josuke from every other JoJo.

Aqua Necklace kills Ryohei by hiding in a whiskey bottle — Anjuro's Stand is water, and it enters whatever a victim drinks. Josuke finds his grandfather bleeding from the eyes and mouth and heals the wounds with Crazy Diamond, but healing is not resurrection; the hemorrhaging had already finished its work. Morioh's coroners recorded a brain tumor. Only the Stand users knew a murder had happened at all.

That gap — a town that cannot perceive the war being fought over it — becomes Diamond Is Unbreakable's signature dread, paid off fully in the Kira arc, where another invisible killer hides inside Morioh's ordinary life. Ryohei's room is kept untouched as a memorial, and the arc's quiet thesis stands: the people who protect a town are usually invisible to it, in death as in life.