"We've Lost the 'Aloha' Feeling"

By James Kelly

Nagging crime, falling tourism and restive Hawaiians

"The loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean," wrote Mark Twain about Hawaii in 1908. Time has not altered that verdict. The palm trees still sway in the cool breezes, the Pacific surf still spills across powdery white beaches, and the scent of lei still perfumes the air. Yet amid its travel-brochure lushness, Hawaii is struggling to cope with a surge in crime, a slump in tourism and the social strains caused by two decades of rapid growth. Laments Honolulu Mayor Eileen Anderson: "We've lost the feeling of 'Aloha' for one another."

The clearest sign of paradise lost is the state's crime rate. Between 1976 and 1980, murders climbed 53%, rape 61% and robbery 55%. Among 18 U.S. cities with a population of 500,000 to 1 million, Honolulu ranked fifth in larceny and ninth in car thefts last year. State officials last week reported that crime was down 8.1% for the first quarter of 1981, compared with the same period in 1980, but the dip hardly dents the growth of the problem in recent years. Admits Deputy Chief of Police Harold Falk Jr.: "Honolulu is no longer some isolated South Sea paradise. We suffer the same problems as big cities on the mainland."

Though some 90% of the crimes in Hawaii are committed against permanent residents, it is the remaining 10%--those committed against tourists--that cause the biggest headlines. The trials of nine youths for the rape of a Finnish dental student in a park near Honolulu in 1979 attracted worldwide attention, as did the murder of a young California couple on a popular hiking trail on Kauai last March. Perhaps the most audacious crime of the past year occurred in early March, when a pair of armed teen-agers hijacked a busload of Japanese tourists at Honolulu airport and robbed them of $11,000 in cash and a stack of cameras and jewelry; two suspects were arrested the same day.

Though the increase in theft and violence cannot be pinned to any single cause, many blame the influx of outsiders, which has increased the gap between rich and poor. Among the most downtrodden: the Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians. Those descendants of the islands' original Polynesian settlers make up less than 20% of the total population of 975,000. (Of the rest, 26% are Caucasian, 25% are of Japanese stock and the balance Filipino, Chinese and Korean, among other ethnic groups). Poorly educated and relegated for the most part to the lower rungs of the economic ladder, the Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians resent the immigrants, or malihinis, for dominating the political and commercial landscape of the lands that once belonged to them. Says Hawaiian Activist A. Leiomalama Solomon: "They don't tell us to get to the back of the bus. They just make it more difficult for us to get on the bus."

Their resentment is only sharpened by the haphazard development of the islands over the past two decades. Between 1970 and 1980, the population of Hawaii registered its greatest increase ever. Around Honolulu, subdivisions have sprung up on land once covered by pineapple plants and sugar cane. On Maui, the once pristine coastline between Lahaina and Kaanapali is now studded with hotels and condominiums. Says Kazu Morita, 62, a third-generation Japanese Hawaiian who owns a gas station on Kauai: "When we were kids, we could go through anybody's property to the sea. Now they've built houses, and we cannot get close." Most annoying to many Hawaiians is that so much of the development is controlled by Japanese and other foreigners. Says John Werheim, a cucumber farmer on Kauai: "When the big international chains come here they pay the chambermaids little, the taxes go up, the roads get crowded, and the profits leave."

The tensions are also exacerbated by a slump in tourism, the state's premier industry ($2.6 billion in 1979). The number of tourists dropped last year for the first time since 1949, and the visitor count during the first quarter of 1981 was down 5% from the same period in 1980. Many native Hawaiians work in hotels, stores and other tourist-dependent businesses, and the fall-off has encouraged the state government to boost efforts to diversify the economy.

For nearly a decade, many Hawaiians have been pushing to reclaim the lands that were seized from their ancestors when the U.S. annexed the islands in 1898. "We were seeing everything slipping out of our hands," recalls Charles Kauluwehi Maxwell, a retired Maui policeman. "The native Hawaiians felt that the only thing they had to hang on to was their land." In 1973 the first of several bills claiming reparations of 2 million acres and $1 billion was introduced in Congress. Hawaiian activists believe that any settlement will have to await the report of a Native Hawaiians Study Commission set up in the closing weeks of the Carter Administration.

Yet the activists can claim at least one victory: the state in 1978 created the office of Hawaiian affairs, whose nine trustees were elected in a Hawaiians-only ballot last November. The office is still hiring staff members, but for the first time the islands' dispossessed minority has a popularly elected agency to represent its interests.

Hawaiians have also begun to take greater pride in their ways and customs as they struggle to reassert their identity. Two decades ago, churches on the islands routinely refused to baptize children unless they were given Anglicized names; Hawaiians now openly give their children traditional names (most common: Kimo for boys and Mele for girls). At Roosevelt High School in Honolulu, 90 students are now studying Hawaiian; the course did not exist three years ago. Since 1974 ten outrigger racing clubs have sprung up on the island of Hawaii alone. Governor George Ariyoshi, for one, applauds the Hawaiians' new assertiveness. Says Ariyoshi, a Japanese-American: "In Hawaii more people understand other people's culture than anywhere else on earth. If we don't make a conscious effort, we are going to lose that." --By James Kelly. Reported by Michael Moritz/Honolulu

With reporting by Michael Moritz

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