The Tsutomu Kanai Award was established in 1997 by a generous endowment from Hitachi Ltd., and named in honor of Dr. Tsutomu Kanai who served as Hitachi's president for 30 years. The Kanai Award recognized major contributions to the state-of-the art distributed computing systems and their applications. The award consisted of a crystal model, certificate, and $10,000 honorarium. This award was discontinued after 2012.