Kanai was born December 5, 1908, in the small town of
Koloa in what was then the Territory of Hawaii. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Hawaiʻi in 1930, and in 1935, after his return from an extended trip to Japan, he began working for the Lihue, Kauai
YMCA. In 1937, Kanai moved to California to take a job at San Francisco's Buchanan Street YMCA, where he remained until the war. ==References==