![]() “I don’t know quite what to make of it, or how we deal with it. And they see our tour as being a way to give them permission.” It made him uneasy. “But people want to come here, and now that they know that there’s some problematic aspect of tourism in Hawai‘i, they want to come here guilt-free,” Kajihiro went on. In a sense, it was nice to hear that readers wanted to explore the inherent power imbalance between tourists and the toured. And now it’s become a thing, this dark tourism.” “Even a tour like ours is now seen as something that people want to consume. “It’s this incessant nature of capitalism to always commodify and fetishize everything,” he said. ![]() But there was a problem: since the book’s publication, Kajihiro had been inundated with requests, many of them from travel writers who now knew of his operation. It aimed to counter a historically colonialist narrative that has shaped Western ideas about Hawai‘i for centuries. I had found him after reading a book that borrows the “DeTours” name, a collection of essays called Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i (2019). If we do it at all, it has some intentionality of what we’re going to do and why.” “We don’t have a website,” Kajihiro said. Today, it focuses on four stops: ‘Iolani Palace Camp Smith, the headquarters of the United States Indo-Pacific Command Pu‘uloa, referred to in English as Pearl Harbor and Hanakēhau Learning Farm, in Waiawa. He hoped to introduce outsiders to local people and to build lasting connections that would subvert an industry predicated on “escape.” By 2004, the tour was formalized. He wanted visitors to understand the struggle of Native Hawaiians to recover their land and assert their right to practice their culture. In the beginning, Kajihiro sought to expose visitors to the history of the sovereign Hawaiian Kingdom, including its overthrow, in 1893, by white American businessmen with help from the Marines. “How does it mask the violence of colonialism and militarization in Hawai‘i?” “So that was one of the things that we tried to address, the discourse of tourism,” he explained. He wanted to show them there was more to his home than vacationing on the beach. “They became sort of like giddy teenagers and they just thought of Hawai‘i as a playground.” It troubled him. “Something switched off in their brains,” he said. Visitors-including academics and activists, politically progressive people he considered friends-were weird about Hawai‘i. Back home, he came to observe something he hadn’t noticed as a child. The DeTours, he told me at his office on campus in downtown Honolulu, are meant to puncture a tourist’s sense of entitlement and focus instead on the land and people who were in Hawai‘i first, whose lives and cultures and histories have been transformed by outside interference.īorn and raised in Honolulu to a fourth-generation Japanese family, Kajihiro moved to Oregon for college and lived there for fifteen years before returning, in 1996. ![]() Kajihiro, who has a gray beard, cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and wire-rimmed glasses, had a different attitude. Kennedy International Airport one morning in December, when I was greeted at bag check by airline employees wearing leis and saying, in Queens and Brooklyn accents, “Aloha!” On board, automated videos about flight safety were interspersed with messages from airline employees telling tourists that they and the people of Hawai‘i were eager to welcome them, that they were happy to share their special place. The tour is entirely different from the fantasy that was sold to me from the moment I arrived at the Hawaiian Airlines terminal at New York’s John F. Called “DeTours,” they offer an alternative to the glossy experiences advertised in the travel sections of newspapers and magazines and in the guidebooks that line the shelves of “World” departments at bookstores. Since the nineties, Kajihiro, a fifty-six-year-old activist and PhD candidate in geography at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, has, along with a colleague named Terrilee Keko‘olani, run demilitarized tours of O‘ahu. A tour with Kyle Kajihiro wasn’t going to happen.
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