TOKYO >> Ayami Sugawara, a 45-year-old service industry worker from Tokyo, loves Hawaii. She first visited the islands when she was 8 years old and has been to Hawaii seven times, taking her from Oahu to Kauai and Maui.

She got married in Hawaii, and the islands inspired the names of her two children. She named her daughter Lei and her son Io — after Iolani Palace.

“I feel a connection to the land,” Sugawara said, explaining that she gets the opportunity to connect with nature, hike and swim in ways she doesn’t feel she can at home. She said she feels a deep spiritual connection to Hawaii and feels like it’s a second home.

In the times she’s returned to the islands, Sugawara has brought different friend groups, from former classmates to co-workers, to share the experience with them. At home in Japan, she’s involved with hula groups and regularly looks for Hawaiian cultural events.

Changing modes of travel and shifting tastes are changing the way Japanese tourists experience Hawaii. And it’s changing how they perceive island culture — both while visiting Hawaii and back home in Japan.

Hawaii has consistently rated as the top desired travel destination for the Japanese people. Japanese travel companies have aggressively marketed Honolulu, and a wide range of companies offer tours for Japanese visitors, with Japanese-speaking guides who shepherd them around the island.

But Yoko Hayano, chief consultant with Tokyo-­based JTB Tourism Research & Consulting, said data shows that for Japanese travelers abroad, “there has been a shift from packaged tours.” She said the internet has given Japanese travelers more opportunities to book their own hotels and travel independently, and that it’s changing how they interact with the communities they visit.

Ryoji Soranaka, a restaurateur and music promoter who was born in Japan but raised in Aiea, worked for a travel company in his 20s. He said tours were highly programmed, and “maybe there were two open days, and one day they’d eat Japanese food and another they’d maybe buy some musubis and stuff like that.”

Soranaka said that these days, Japanese tourists are “deviating and renting a car, going to the North Shore, Waiahole Poi Factory, they know Rainbow Drive-In. A lot of my Japanese customers know places I don’t know, that I haven’t gone to … . I think they’re more in tune.”

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Soranaka owns and operates a series of businesses in Hawaii and Japan, splitting his time between both.

In 2003, he and his wife, Motoko, opened a Hawaii-­style restaurant in Japan called Ogo’s Cafe. Hawaiian restaurants were already beginning to sprout up around Tokyo, but Soranaka said his goal was to “keep it real” and provide authentic local favorites such as loco moco, kalua pork, huli huli chicken and ahi poke.

“You can go to an Italian restaurant in Japan, and (the food) is ‘Japanized,’ but it’s killer right?” Soranaka said. “(But) for me, for the Hawaiian food, I wasn’t going to alter it.”

They quickly attracted expats with ties to Hawaii but soon also began drawing Japanese with a deep love of Hawaii. The business has moved across town from its original location but maintained a loyal following.

Soranaka and his wife have since expanded the business to include catering. Through his music promotion business, he regularly hosts musicians and hula performers from Hawaii at the cafe and has booked them at other venues across Japan. Soranaka said when it comes to Japan’s die-hard Hawaii lovers, “it is a subculture, and that Hawaii subculture is big in Japan.”

Beyond Waikiki

People from Hawaii who have lived and worked in Japan have played a key role in helping ignite a fascination with their homeland.

Sugawara said that many companies across Japan are eager to tap into the public’s fascination with Hawaii and that Japanese tourist operators regularly stage events promoting the Aloha State, with promotions at restaurants and malls.

“Through these events, people sort of superficially get a feel of what Hawaii is about, they superficially get to know Hawaii,” she said. “I would say that Japanese people are not very good at relaxing. For example, doing nothing, sitting at the beach or around a swimming pool, so they focus on shopping and looking for gourmet food. So that’s why those events are popular here.”

Hiroyuki Furukawa, manager of the Hawaii section for Japanese travel agency HIS Co. Ltd., said “for Japanese especially, people travel to Hawaii for the sake of traveling to Hawaii. So that itself has become a purpose. So, therefore, it’s difficult to create a standardized package, which resonates with everyone.”

While in the past, shopping and sightseeing tours were among the top desired activities, today the top three things Japanese travelers say they want to experience are nature, authentic local food and learning about history.

But Japanese companies looking to cash in on Hawaii’s image have mostly marketed Waikiki’s resorts and malls to prospective Japanese tourists. Furukawa said that in Japan, “people tend to think Hawaii is equal to Waikiki or Honolulu to some extent.”

Hayano said state tourism agencies in recent years launched a campaign to raise awareness of the neighbor islands in the Japanese tourism market, which she said appears to have been largely successful. “Before this campaign people only knew about Oahu,” she said.

Furukawa said that while the neighbor islands still are not well known, they are becoming more popular, particularly Kauai.

Shigeru Ai, a 60-year-old doctor from Tokyo, has never been to Hawaii but said he would love to. A history buff, he has traveled to Europe to visit castles and other historic sites. But he said that when it comes to Hawaii, Japanese people know about the resorts they see in Japanese media and know of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, but beyond that “we are not educated on (Hawaii’s) history.”

Ai said that through his own reading, he has some knowledge of the Hawaiian Kingdom but that Japanese people largely are ignorant of it and Hawaii’s Indigenous history.

Furukawa, who lived in Honolulu for five years working at his company’s Hawaii branch, said even when it comes to the Hawaiian Kingdom’s relationship with Japan and the history of Japanese immigration to Hawaii, most people in Japan know little to nothing.

“We haven’t really promoted enough about that aspect, but there is a connection,” Furukawa said. “Still, (many Japanese) people perceive Hawaii as just a resort that they admire. So maybe we should look at the ways that we market and project the image about Hawaii together with different operators in the industry … so that we can focus more on the cultural aspects and cultural experiences.”

Return travel strong

International travel cratered in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic spread. Japanese outbound travel between 2020 and 2022 was at its lowest since 1976, according to Japanese government data, after a record high of more than 20 million in 2019.

But 2023 saw a massive jump from just over 2 million Japanese international travelers in 2022 to more than 9 million.

Hawaii leaders in industries dependent on tourism have expressed concern that Japanese tourism hasn’t rebounded to the degree they had hoped.

Despite shifts in where Japanese people travel, with more and more choosing cheap flights to destinations in Southeast Asia, Hayano said the percentage of Japanese travelers choosing to come to Hawaii has remained “flatish,” citing a report by her firm that found that in 2002 about 9.2% of Japanese traveling internationally chose Hawaii, and in 2023 it was 8.7%, demonstrating a relatively stable demand.

Takashi Watanabe, director of international affairs for the Japanese government office overseeing tourism, said traveler preferences “may be shifting from just shopping and sightseeing to nature and relaxing. In a sense, Hawaii is, I think, still a perfect destination in terms of relaxation. But at the same time, we think Hawaii is in a situation where the Japanese people want to go, but cannot go due to price increases.”

However, Watanabe also said that data shows that when it comes to Japanese people who travel to Hawaii, 40% of those surveyed said they go regularly, with 60% of those returning three or more times. Notably, 10% of visitors said they were going to visit relatives or friends living in Hawaii.

“At the end of the day, you know, the tourist market just fluctuates, so you need to have that core (group),” Soranaka said.

Sugawara maintains her love of Hawaii’s culture and people despite struggling to connect with people because of her limited English vocabulary. She feels comfortable renting a car and traveling the island, noting that a lot of people in Hawaii are able to speak some Japanese to her, and that even those who can’t are “very patient and kind.”

Sugawara recalled visiting Oahu shortly after she suffered a miscarriage. She recounted visiting Manoa Valley and hiking through the jungle. She said that as she felt the breeze, she sensed the islands were helping her heal.

Later in her trip, she visited the Kukaniloko birth stones near Wahiawa, a birthing place for Hawaiian royalty. After returning to Japan she became pregnant again and was able to carry her first child to term.

Sugawara said there’s no way she can prove it, but she believes visiting Kukaniloko helped her finally start her family.

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Kevin Knodell reported on this story as part of a fellowship with the Foreign Press Center Japan.