Daily Life in Hawaiʻi

Most days in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi begin early, because most days involve a drive.

The Kingdom holds about 1.6 million people on eight islands, seventy per cent of them on Oʻahu, and rather more than half of those on the wrong side of Oʻahu from the work. The west-side commute into Honolulu runs an hour and a half in the morning and rather longer coming back, and it is done by people who could not have afforded to live nearer even if they had wanted to. The traffic on the H1 at half past five in the morning is the most honest single fact about the Kingdom, and it is the one no visitor sees, because at half past five in the morning the visitor is asleep in a hotel eleven miles away.

What follows is the texture of the place rather than its constitution, which is set out in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi article.

Rent, and who gets to stay

The Kingdom has the highest cost of living in the Realm and it is not close. Housing is the reason.

The shape of it is this. Land is finite, on eight islands, with a third of it held in the Crown trust and much of the rest either steep, dry, protected or already built on. Anybody in the Realm may move to the islands at will, and about as many people arrive each year as leave. Tens of thousands of dwellings have been converted to visitor letting. And a Kingdom which taxes lightly because the trust pays for so much has never had the fiscal instruments other places use to intervene.

The result is that an ordinary Hawaiian household is three generations in a house built for one, and that this is as often a strength as a hardship. Grandparents mind children, the middle generation works two jobs between them, and the house holds. Multi-generational living in Hawaiʻi is partly cultural and mostly arithmetic, and families who can afford otherwise frequently do it anyway.

The thing people actually talk about is whether the children will be able to stay. A young teacher, nurse, cook or carpenter can find work in the islands easily and housing almost not at all, and the mainland is five hours away with wages that go three times as far. The exodus of the 1990s and 2000s was real, and it has slowed rather than reversed, and it slowed because of the restriction on non-resident purchase, the residence rules, and a deliberate programme of return run through the trust. It has not stopped. Every Hawaiian family of any size has somebody in California.

Several thousand people live outside on Oʻahu, in the parks, along the Waiʻanae coast and in encampments the councils clear and which reassemble. They are disproportionately Hawaiian. The Kingdom has tried enforcement, then housing-first, then enforcement again, and the beaches and the parks are where the argument about the cost of living is actually conducted.

The plate

Hawaiian food is the Kingdom’s demographic history served hot and cheap, and it is eaten standing up.

At the centre is kalo, taro, and poi, protected in law and in water rights and grown in reflooded loʻi across the wet valleys of every island. Around it is everything the plantations brought: rice, saimin, Portuguese sausage and malasadas, kimchi, Filipino adobo, Japanese pickles, Chinese noodles, Samoan and Tongan cooking from the more recent Pacific migrations. The plate lunch, two scoops of rice, macaroni salad and something with a sauce, is the plantation camps’ pooled lunch made permanent, and it is eaten by everyone from a window at a counter for very little money.

Food security is genuinely better than it was. A generation after the plantations closed, a statutory programme of production targets and cheap trust tenancies has brought imports down from about ninety per cent of the Kingdom’s food to about sixty, and the restored loko iʻa, the ancient walled fishponds, are working food systems again on four islands rather than heritage sites. A fishpond wall takes a community a decade to rebuild and it is rebuilt by volunteers on Saturdays.

Eating out is expensive because land is expensive, and the restaurants that serve the visitor economy have priced themselves out of local use in most of Waikīkī and much of Kona and Lahaina. Nobody minds very much. There is a separate and better economy of lunch wagons, saimin stands, corner bakeries, Japanese counters and church-hall fundraisers, and it is where the Kingdom actually eats.

The ocean before work

The ocean is not scenery here and it is not a holiday. It is a road, a larder, a school, a workplace, a graveyard and the reason the Kingdom exists, and people are in it before work and after it.

Children learn ocean safety at an age that startles mainland visitors. Surfing is genuinely universal, a thing most people do rather than a sport most people watch, and the fact that the Kingdom also runs the world’s professional circuit and produces most of its champions is something Hawaiians mention rather less often than outsiders expect. Outrigger paddling is the club sport: every coastal town has a canoe club, the season runs to the long inter-island crossings, and a paddling club is as much a social institution as a chapel or a school.

Fishing is subsistence, culture and small commerce at once, and near-shore rights are a live legal matter rather than a folk memory, because kuleana access across other people’s land is enforceable and gets enforced.

The reefs are in trouble. Three bleaching events in a decade, each worse than the last, and the reefs are what protect the shoreline, feed the near-shore fishery and hold up a good deal of the visitor economy. Local rules on sunscreen and anchoring and a very large restoration programme are doing what they can about a problem whose cause is elsewhere, which is the position the Kingdom finds itself in on most environmental questions.

A paddle-out is how the Kingdom buries the people it loves. The boards go out in a ring beyond the break, flowers go into the water, and the ring holds for a while before it comes in. It is a genuine and common funeral rite rather than a photogenic one, and cameras are expected to stay well back.

Two languages

About a third of the Kingdom speaks ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi well and nearly everybody has some, and both languages are in ordinary use without anybody making an occasion of it.

The reason is the schools. Every school in the Kingdom teaches in both, and a parallel immersion stream teaching wholly in Hawaiian takes about a third of all pupils, which means a third of every generation since the 1980s has come out fluent. The stream is oversubscribed on every island and short of teachers on every island, and parents put names down years ahead.

What this produces in daily life is a country where the language of the kitchen and the language of the office are frequently different, where a grandparent and a grandchild may be more fluent than the parent between them, where a legislative debate switches languages mid-sentence and nobody translates, and where the Hawaiian-language daily paper is the small one everybody reads for the serious news.

Names are said properly. The ʻokina and the kahakō are not required by any law and are used everywhere, and a public official who gets a place name wrong while speaking about respect has lost the room before the policy starts. Hawaiians will correct a visitor, generally kindly, generally once.

Church, hālau, and what people belong to

Most Hawaiians belong to something, and often to three things.

The churches are numerous and well attended: Congregational and Catholic above all, with very large and long-settled Latter-day Saint and Buddhist communities from the plantation migrations, and the Pacific congregations that came later. Church halls do a great deal of the Kingdom’s social work, and a funeral, a graduation or a fundraiser is as likely to happen in one as anywhere.

The hālau, the schools of hula, are the other pillar. Hula in Hawaiʻi was never banned and never had to be rescued, so a hālau is a continuous institution with a lineage rather than a revival, and belonging to one is a serious commitment of evenings and weekends over years. The competitive season is followed nationally in the way a league is followed elsewhere.

Alongside both, and untroubled by either, Hawaiian religious practice is ordinary. A building is blessed, a canoe is blessed, a landing is blessed, and the practitioner who does it holds a formal qualification from an order reconstituted during the renaissance. Most people who take part in this also go to church, and very few of them experience any tension worth discussing.

Hānai, the Hawaiian practice of giving and taking children within a family, is common, legally recognised and entirely unremarkable, and it is how the present King came to be his father’s son. Mainland visitors find this confusing and Hawaiians find the confusion confusing.

The islands are eight different countries

Almost nothing said about Hawaiʻi is true of all of it.

On Oʻahu the daily texture is urban: the commute, the rail line, the towers, the harbour, the naval gates, the university, and Waikīkī, which is simultaneously one of the most recognisable landscapes on earth and the workplace of tens of thousands of people on shift.

On Hawaiʻi island it is distance. Hilo is wet and green and is the Kingdom’s cultural capital; Kona is dry and is the resort coast; the drive between them is three hours and the mountain is always there. It is the island with land, and it is where the Kingdom’s growth is going.

On Maui it is the fire. Lahaina burned in 2023 with about a hundred dead, and about half of it is back, under a residency condition that has kept most of the ground in Maui hands. Everybody on the island knows somebody.

On Kauaʻi it is restraint made into local law: strict building limits, fewer visitors on purpose, one road that does not go all the way round.

On Molokaʻi it is seven thousand people, no resorts, no traffic lights, more Hawaiian spoken than anywhere else, and a settled habit of saying no that the rest of the Kingdom admires and does not have to pay for.

On Lānaʻi it is a trust island being deliberately rebuilt, housing before resort, and the whole Kingdom watching to see whether it works.

On Niʻihau it is closure, and an argument about whether closure has preserved the island or trapped it.

Kahoʻolawe has nobody on it. It has been a bombing range since 1941 and it has two empty chairs in the island chamber, and on Unification Day the chairs are carried through the streets of Honolulu.

Getting about

Everything between the islands goes by air or by sea, which means a specialist appointment, a court hearing, a funeral or a school championship is a flight. Mainland visitors think of a flight as an event. A Hawaiian family thinks of it as a bus with worse pricing, and the price is a social policy question that gets argued about at every budget.

The publicly owned inter-island ferry, restored in the 2010s after decades without one, is slow and cheap and has made a real difference to the small islands. The airlines fought it and lost.

Freight comes by barge from Honolulu, so the outer islands pay Honolulu prices plus the barge on everything they eat, wear and build with. Two households on the same wage on different islands are not living the same life, and the gap between islands is a sharper inequality in the Kingdom than the gap between incomes.

The visitor

Ten million people a year come to look at a country of 1.6 million, and there is no cap on the number and no serious tax on them.

Hawaiians are not, on the whole, hostile to visitors. A quarter of the jobs in the Kingdom depend on them and most families have somebody in the industry. What people mind is a narrower and more specific thing: being consumed. Being asked to perform an identity for an audience while the language programmes run short of teachers. Finding the beach they grew up on reachable only through a hotel. Being served second in their own town during the season.

The hospitality workforce carries the whole of this. Long commutes from housing they can just afford, shifts built around other people’s holidays, emotional labour with a smile attached, and a cost of living set by the industry they work in.

There is a version of Hawaiʻi arranged for ten million people to see, and it is not a lie exactly, and it is not the country. Visitors who work this out generally have a better time.

The year

The Hawaiian calendar comes first and the Realm’s is fitted around it.

Makahiki, the old four-month season of peace, tribute and games, is a working public institution rather than a commemoration: the legislature rises, the courts sit short, and the traditional games are contested island against island. Kamehameha Day on 11 June brings the lei-draping and the island pāʻū riders. Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea on 31 July, Restoration Day, is kept with more feeling and less apparatus than anything official, because it marks the Kingdom getting itself back.

May Day is the most layered date in the Hawaiian year. Locally it is Lei Day, and has been since long before anything else attached to it: children make lei, schools hold programmes, and a great deal of the Kingdom’s flowers are cut. It is also the Realm’s day of labour memory and national mourning for the Union March attacks of 2006. A school may hold a lei programme in the morning and teach why public assembly matters in the afternoon, and hospitality workers hold their labour events the same evening. One date carrying flowers, work, grief, children and memory is not a muddle. It is how a small country with a long calendar accommodates a large one with a short memory.

The December anniversary of the attack on the anchorage is the Realm’s ceremony, held in a Hawaiian city, attended by Hawaiians, and never entirely comfortable.

The Crown, close up

The King is young, surfs, and is seen about. This is not a courtly monarchy and it never has been: a Hawaiian sovereign is expected to turn up, to speak Hawaiian properly, to know genealogies, and to be photographed doing something useful rather than receiving something.

What makes the Crown immediate in ordinary life is less the ceremony than the land. A third of the Kingdom is the trust’s, which means a great many people’s landlord, a great many schools’ funder and a great many leases’ counterparty is, in the last resort, one man. Hawaiians are entirely clear about this and discuss the King’s signature the way people elsewhere discuss interest rates.

✎ Editor's Note · Where people are from

The register for Hawaiʻi is the opposite of postcard. The textures that belong here are the container port, the school chant, the reef sign, the church hall, the timecard, the boarding pass, the rice cooker, the fishpond wall, the eviction notice and the storm map, in the same frame as the lei and the royal standard. The Kingdom is beautiful and the beauty is the condition under which everything harder gets overlooked.

Trivia

In-Universe Three generations in one house is the ordinary Hawaiian arrangement and is as much arithmetic as culture. Families who could afford to live apart frequently do not.
In-Universe A paddle-out is a common Hawaiian funeral rite: the boards form a ring beyond the break, flowers go into the water, and the ring holds a while before it comes in. Cameras are expected to stay well back.
In-Universe About a third of all pupils in the Kingdom are in the Hawaiian-medium immersion stream, which is oversubscribed on every island and short of teachers on every island. Parents put names down years ahead.
In-Universe The Hawaiian-language daily newspaper is much the smaller of the Kingdom's two and is the paper of record for anything constitutional. The English-language paper generally reports it the following day in translation.
In-Universe Hānai, the Hawaiian giving and taking of children within a family, is common, legally recognised and entirely unremarkable in the Kingdom. Kamehameha VII is his father's son by hānai.
In-Universe Outrigger paddling is the Kingdom's club sport. Every coastal town has a canoe club, the season builds to the long inter-island crossings, and a club is a social institution on the order of a chapel or a school.
In-Universe Restored loko iʻa, the walled fishponds, are working food systems again on four islands rather than heritage sites. A pond wall takes a community about a decade and is rebuilt by volunteers on Saturdays.
In-Universe Freight to the outer islands comes by barge from Honolulu, so an outer-island household pays Honolulu prices plus the barge on everything. The sharpest inequality in the Kingdom is between islands rather than between incomes.
In-Universe May Day in Hawaiʻi is Lei Day, the Realm's day of labour memory, and national mourning for the 2006 Union March attacks, all at once. Schools hold lei programmes in the morning and teach public assembly in the afternoon.
In-Universe Kūpuna are carriers of language, genealogy and practice as well as elders, and public bodies that extract their knowledge unpaid because it is heritage are told about it. Respect in this context is understood to include transport, food, time and a fee.
In-Universe Kahoʻolawe has no residents and two seats in the island chamber, which are left empty. On Unification Day the two chairs are carried through the streets of Honolulu.
Design Daily life in Hawaiʻi is written in the Society register rather than the constitutional one: the commute, the rent, the plate and the paddle-out, with the Crown appearing where it actually touches ordinary life, which is through land. The constitutional account belongs in the polity article and is deliberately not repeated here.
Design The Kingdom is built without a single villain. Visitors, the defence presence and the Crown trust each bring real benefits and real costs at the same time, and no available bill resolves any of them cleanly. That is what gives the place its political texture.
Etymology Kuleana means responsibility, privilege and relationship at once: the word encodes the idea that a claim on land, family or community carries duties in the same breath as rights. It is not a tourism slogan and Hawaiians notice when it is used as one.
Real-World The Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown in 1893 and the islands were annexed and later admitted as the fiftieth state. Here the overthrow failed, the Kingdom acceded by treaty in 1898 with its Crown, courts, legislature, land and language intact, and the daily consequences of that survival, particularly the language and the unbroken hula lineage, are the largest divergences in ordinary life.
Real-World The housing crisis, the visitor pressure, the commute from the west side of Oʻahu and the Lahaina fire of 2023 are all real and are described here substantially as they are. What differs is that a Hawaiian government with its own land, courts and revenue is the body that has to answer for them.