ABSTRACT
The conference was organized to take advantage of our location: the author's did all of their work in the morning and then were free to spend their afternoons and evenings at Waikiki beach or wherever they wanted to go. Central to that destination image for Waikiki beach, Desmond suggests, is the hula girl. Waikiki beach then represents, in the popular mind, a highly desirable tourist destination: wonderful weather and the paradise-like 'beach' culture that they find to be exotic, and yet in a place with all the creature comforts of contemporary American society. Surrounding Waikiki now are many very large hotels, a number of which are owned by Japanese businesses. Some tourism scholars have suggested that visitors to Waikiki experience the 'Bali Syndrome', which involves exposure to artificial Polynesian cultures and is based more on a desire for escape from the routines of everyday life than on a desire for real cultural immersion.
