Hanshi (Honorable Master) Steve Arneil was born in South Africa in 1934.  At the age of 10, his family moved to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), and there he began training in Judo and boxing.  His mother made him stop boxing, but he continued studying Judo.
 From an early age, Hanshi Arneil was fascinated with the Orient, and he began watching a Chinese man practicing Shorin (Shaolin) Kempo in the man's back yard.  The Chinese man noticed Arneil "spying" on him, and invited him to train.  Arneil accepted the offer and trained with his new friend throughout his school years and college.

Around the age of 25, Hanshi Arneil moved to Durban, South Africa, to complete his education in mechanical engineering.  He found a local Judo dojo in Durban that also offered karate.  At the time, a number of Japanese people were immigrating to South Africa, arriving at the port city of Durban.  Arneil would go to the arriving ships and ask if any of the Japanese practiced karate.  If so, he would invite them to train at the dojo.  These men practiced various karate styles, but Arneil didn't care about the differences – to him, karate was karate.

After completing his engineering education, Hanshi Arneil went back home to Northern Rhodesia. Still fascinated with the Orient, he decided to go there and experience it for himself, and his Chinese friend gave him the names of people to train with in China. Fresh out of college and without any money, Arneil got a job as an engineer on a ship and worked his way from Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), to Kowloon, Hong Kong. From there, he went into China and traveled northward to the province of Manchuria, where he came to a monastery at which he studied Shorin (Shaolin) Kempo. The rigorous training, strict discipline, daily work in the monastery's fields and daily meditation was just what Arneil was looking for – he was in "seventh heaven."

Unfortunately, China was beginning to experience Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, and life for a Westerner in China began to get difficult. People outside of the monastery even started hitting Arneil on the head with their copies of Mao's "Little Red Book". His friends at the monastery suggested that he leave China for his own safety, and they brought him back to Kowloon to train with another kempo teacher. The training was very different than at the monastery, and Arneil didn't like it.

Around that time, Hanshi Arneil heard of a karate master in Japan named Mas Oyama, and he was determined to go there and seek him out. He didn't have enough money to get to Japan, so he first had to work on boats to the Philippines. When Arneil finally saved enough money, he returned to Hong Kong and from there went to Yokohama, Japan in 1961.