Lincoln Kanai
Lincoln Seiichi Kanai (1908–1982) was a social worker who was one of several Japanese Americans to bring a legal challenge against the exclusion of people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast during World War II. 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. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kanai testified before the Tolan Committee and corresponded with various political and military leaders, attempting to persuade them against the mass removal of Japanese Americans from California and quell the tide of anti-Japanese prejudice that had cost many Japanese Americans their jobs. His proposals to hold hearings to assess the loyalty of Japanese Americans instead of removing them en masse, and to allow students, the elderly and handicapped individuals to avoid incarceration went unheeded. When the Western Defense Command issued an order for