Despite WWII internment, Hayano 'was never bitter'

Joseph Hayano, a Japanese-American who nearly lost his life in a farming accident while he was interned during World War II, made the Twin Cities his home for more than 60 years.

Hayano, who moved to Minneapolis to attend Dunwoody Institute in the mid-1940s and became a service-station owner, died Jan. 9 in his St. Louis Park home. He was 88.

When Hayano was a boy in school, teachers called him Joseph, so he adopted it. His given first name was Torao.

In 1942, his immigrant parents were farming potatoes in Mount Vernon, Wash. They were given only days to pack up some belongings and were forced to move to an internment camp at Tule Lake in California in the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the war.

"They understood why they were there, but they didn't understand why everything was taken away from them," said his daughter, Mary of St. Louis Park.

On the farm, Hayano would hunt, a skill that served his family well in the internment camp.

At the camp, he would cover himself with snow after baiting the area with grain. When a goose took the bait, he'd grab the bird for dinner, said his daughter.

There, German POWs weren't allowed to drive the tractor, so that was his job. One day, Hayano's leg was caught and mangled in the tractor's machinery. But for the quick action of the Germans, he probably would have bled to death, said his daughter.

They got him to the farm headquarters, where others got him to a hospital. He lost his right leg below the knee.

After a lengthy rehabilitation and war's end, he decided to move to Minneapolis. Hayano's children don't know exactly why he chose the Twin Cities, but they do know why he never returned to Washington.

"There was no family farm to go back to in Washington," his son, Richard, of Minneapolis, wrote.

After Hayano found work as a busboy and as a mechanic, he started his own service station in Minneapolis. And he arranged to have his family move to the Twin Cities.

After 20 years, he moved his business to St. Louis Park, operating the Minnetonka Skelly station from about 1970 to 1987.

His daughter recalled when she bought her first Japanese automobile.

"He was so mad at me," said his daughter. "He frowned on Americans buying foreign cars."

"He was an American," she added. "He was never bitter."

His wife of 25 years, Dorothy, died in 1993.