Aloha Ahoy: Tourism and Nostalgia at Honolulu Harbor

Abstract

Every year over six million tourists arrive in Honolulu making the island of O'ahu the place in the world with 'the greatest number of tourists per square mile' (Wilson and Dissanayake, 1996, p.7). Out of that staggering number, 230,495, or 3.6% of the state of Hawai'i's total number of annual visitors, were out-of-state cruise ship passengers in 2003. In a move to profit from the arrival of these passengers, the harbor's $100 million, 200,000-square-foot Aloha Tower Marketplace carefully stages a 'Boat Days Again!' arrival, which emulates the spontaneous Boat Day, or Steamer Day, festivities of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s when cheering crowds would greet luxury liners arriving from the U.S. mainland. Today, tourism at Honolulu Harbor is structured around a nostalgic vision of Boat Day and Hawai'i's pre-statehood history in general. 1 Nostalgia works as what Kenneth Burke calls a 'terministic screen' (1968, p.50), that is, as a filter that enforces a principle of continuity between the present and the past by ignoring disruptive and ideologically ambiguous events like the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, the decimation of the indigenous Hawaiian population, and the inglorious arrival of tens of thousands of indentured Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Philippine laborers destined for Hawai'i's sugar cane and pineapple plantations. Instead, nostalgia sustains touristic myths about Hawai'i as an uncomplicated holiday destination. In the present-day Boat Day welcoming rituals, a particular aspect of this nostalgia, namely the longing for the exclusive world of the affluent travelers aboard luxury liners, is asserted as a collective desire for the upper-class tourist experience associated with the interbellum period before air travel made Hawai'i affordable for middle 1 Hawai'i became the 50 th U.S. state on August 21, 1959.