Relaxation of anti-Japanese government policies allows more people to leave Manzanar. With only 6,000 remaining at the end of 1944, the leaving of Eleanor, Shig, and the baby, as well as Woody's conscription into the army in August, creates gaps in Jeanne's family. Two plaintiffs—Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu—fail to force the government to rescind racist laws. Pressed by a third, Mitsue Endo, a successful challenge to racial exclusion results in a landmark decision from the high court: "The government cannot detain loyal citizens against their will." Within twelve months, detainment ceases and detainees begin to return to their homes as the Western Defense Command begins to close internment camps.
Release brings mixed feelings. With no home to return to, the Wakatsukis are ambivalent about their new freedom to live again among racists whose "wartime propaganda—racist headlines, atrocity movies, hate slogans, and fright-mask posters—had turned the Japanese face into something despicable and grotesque." The imminent departure, freighted with the humiliation of three years of unjust confinement, puts Jeanne in touch with an indefinable ache which she terms "the foretaste of being hated." Rather than confront California-style racism, Jeanne's older sisters and brothers choose to move east to New Jersey.
Ko, of a different generation, continues to think of the West Coast as his home and, as diffident as a slave freed during the Civil War, sticks to the old way of life "out of habit or lethargy or fear." Since he can no longer hold a commercial fishing license and his boats and nets have been either confiscated, repossessed, or stolen, he chooses to let the government reinstate him in public life and commerce. At the hospital, Mama observes rampant psychosomatic aches and pains among internees, indicative of insecurity and hesitancy to leave Manzanar. To ease tightness in Mama's back, Jeanne momos (massages) the knotted muscles.
Meanwhile, Ko, in response to a need for housing, proposes a cooperative through which Japanese men will build a housing project in which to settle internees. The departure date looms as summer ends. In August, an atomic bomb incinerates Hiroshima.
By now, the once tightly knit Wakatuski family has, like the camp, deteriorated. Woody is in the army at Fort Douglas, Utah; Eleanor lives in Reno; her husband is stationed in Germany with the occupation troops; Bill and Martha and Frances and Lillian are living in New Jersey; and Ray is now in the Coast Guard, the only service that would take him at the age of seventeen.
In early October, the remaining Wakatsukis can no longer postpone departure.
