2025.09.04-09.08 Yonglin Ke + Masashi Kurobe
The nights in Honolulu are a diverse blend of resort illumination, residential lights, torches, and night market glows. However, as the city develops, the starry sky is fading, raising concerns about the impact on the local ecosystem. Balancing urban growth with light pollution countermeasures remains a significant challenge. We conducted an on-site night walk survey to explore the balance between the city and nature and to evaluate the current lighting environment.
■Honolulu
Honolulu, the capital of the U.S. state of Hawaii, is a prominent tourist destination in the heart of the Pacific Ocean. Simultaneously, it serves as the political and economic hub of the state. In this land where the sea, mountains, and urban areas sit in close proximity, the nightscape reveals a variety of expressions depending on the time and location—blending the glow of resort hotels, the soft lights of residences, traditional fire torches, and the vibrant lights of night markets. Furthermore, the combination of intense sunlight and a tropical climate creates a unique character within the city’s lighting environment.
On the other hand, urban development and the growth of the tourism industry have negatively impacted the visibility of the starry sky and affected local ecosystems, such as migratory birds and sea turtles. While the state and city have begun implementing measures to reduce light pollution, finding a balance with the tourism industry remains a challenge. During this night walk survey, we investigated how the nighttime lighting of Honolulu shapes the environment between the urban landscape and nature.
■Resort & Beach Area
The resort area of Waikiki is a glamorous zone densely packed with hotels and retail spaces. Along the streets, pole lights approximately 10 meters high are lined up at regular intervals, serving as the primary illumination supporting the nighttime scenery. Around the retail shops, floodlights fixed to the trunks of palm trees illuminate the foliage and facades, while bulb-shaped spotlights are installed at varying heights as festive accents. Warm light is scattered throughout, creating a soft, bustling atmosphere that flows with the movement of people.
Particularly striking were the flickering torches found throughout the area. The movement of the flames shifted with the wind, emitting a sense of vitality distinct from artificial lighting. Furthermore, within the retail premises, string lights were wrapped around palm trunks, creating small, festive spaces under the night sky. The combination of natural materials and light produces an extraordinary, resort-like world.
As the night deepens, a night market begins on Kalakaua Avenue. Stalls start lining up around 5:00 PM, with each vendor using various creative lighting techniques to make their booth stand out. On weekdays, after the retail stores close, small stalls offering nail art, portraits, and accessories begin to appear along the road. People gather at every stall, wrapping that corner of the street in a lively, night-market-like bustle.
In contrast, the atmosphere changes completely upon reaching the seaside. While pole lights line the city side of the stone walls bordering the beach, there is no lighting whatsoever on the sand. A large moon hung in the sky, and the water’s edge glowed faintly in the moonlight. The absence of artificial light accentuated the silence and depth of the nighttime ocean. The stray light from streetlamps on the hotel side slightly illuminated the back of the beach, which perversely emphasized the lack of light. This is also a result of ecological protection; light directed toward the sea is strictly restricted to prevent sea turtles from avoiding the shore for nesting and to ensure hatchlings do not head toward land-side lights instead of the ocean.
Turning toward the canal, a different kind of silence awaited. The streets are equipped with streetlights of the same design as those in the retail area, with unified variations for traffic signals, road lights, and pedestrian lights. Meanwhile, the golf course across the canal was pitch black, a sprawling darkness devoid of artificial light. At the very edge of the city’s reach, the boundary between light and dark was clearly visible. While much of the light in the resort area is designed to support commercial vibrancy, the natural darkness of the adjacent beaches and canals is respected. This coexistence of light and dark, shifting continuously, was one of the most memorable scenes in Honolulu’s nightscape. (Ke Yonglin)
■Residencial Area
Moving away from the tourist hub of Waikiki Beach and into the residential neighborhoods, I was struck by the sudden increase in stillness and the disappearance of vehicular and pedestrian traffic.
Residential areas in Hawaii consist largely of single-family homes, where flora such as palm and plumeria trees blend naturally into the properties, creating a lush, island-style landscape. Each area possesses a distinct character: grid-patterned coastal neighborhoods, hillside communities that branch out like trees across terraced slopes, and districts where historical wooden homes remain. Another characteristic feature is the formation of tight-knit communities, facilitated by parks, schools, and local shops clustered near the housing.
The lighting in these residential areas is sparse compared to Japan, with 9-meter-high streetlights positioned at intervals of approximately 20 meters. Broad-beam 3000K light spills onto the road surface, with illuminance levels kept quite modest at an average of around 10 lx. Outdoor architectural lighting within residential lots was similarly understated; most homes featured only under-eave or gate lights, with almost no instances of excessively bright decorative lighting. Observing the interiors through the windows, many homes utilized warm indirect lighting or pendants centered around the living and dining areas. The design philosophy seemed to prioritize coziness and relaxation rather than filling the entire space with brightness. The soft, gentle light filtering through lace curtains was also beautiful.
We held a photo shoot of the residential area on the hill from the valley side. The orange interior light leaking from the windows served as accents to the nightscape, characterized by scattered granular lights and the streaks of light from streetlamps reaching toward the sky. The entire slope looked as if the starry sky had been turned upside down, evoking a sense of profound tranquility.
■Aerial Nightscape of Honolulu
We photographed the nightscape from the side of a road near a hill, about a 20-minute drive from central Honolulu. We were able to observe the city’s distribution, where a gradient exists between the high-luminance band of the commercial and tourist districts on the ocean side and the low-luminance
band of the residential areas on the mountain side, with the light spreading toward the sea like a folding fan. Due to strict building height restrictions, high-rise buildings are concentrated in specific areas; as a result, hotel window lights, commercial facilities, and streetlights overlap to create a belt of high intensity. Despite being such a developed city on the ocean side, large-scale exterior facade lighting was absent; instead, the landscape was formed by interior lights and the illumination of balconies and corridors. While Honolulu does not have regulations as stringent as those on the Big Island of Hawaii, the design consistently avoids upward-shining light to protect the ecosystem and preserve the starry sky. Furthermore, given the density of hotels, it is likely that lighting is practically restricted to prevent glare for guests.
In terms of color temperature, warm bulb colors were more dominant than white, giving the impression that the color temperature of the entire city is unified. This seems to be the result of a combination of individual awareness—residents choosing calm, warm tones for interior lighting— and administrative policies promoting low color temperatures to minimize the impact on sea turtles and the broader ecosystem.
■Main Roads
Between 2018 and 2019, Oahu underwent a large-scale project to convert approximately 53,000 municipal streetlights from sources like sodium lamps to LEDs. While this offered significant economic advantages through reduced energy consumption, it reportedly faced opposition from residents concerned about the natural environment. Ultimately, it appears that 4000K LEDs were adopted for main roads (whereas 3000K LEDs were selected for residential and tourist areas).
Streetlights 10 meters high are positioned at 30-meter intervals, illuminating the main roads with light distributions controlled to ensure uniform coverage. While the illuminance is a modest 20 lx directly beneath the lamps—relatively low for main road lighting—the potential impact on the ecosystem from the 4000K light reflecting off the ground is a point of concern. Furthermore, since the primary goal of the project was energy reduction, the use of bare LED fixtures may have been an unavoidable compromise.
■Daylight
In Honolulu, the daylight conditions—characterized by intense sunlight and high solar radiation levels different from those in Tokyo—have significantly influenced architectural forms, which in turn directly impact nighttime lighting. Deep balconies designed to provide shade allow interior light and downlights to softly illuminate the ceiling surfaces. Furthermore, white exterior walls intended to reflect heat pick up even slight amounts of spill light, naturally creating a sense of vertical luminance even in areas without dedicated lighting fixtures. Additionally, since pedestrian spaces in the city are designed with shade as a prerequisite, large trees are planted everywhere; at night, these trees serve as the primary anchors for the lighting environment.
■Summary
Because residents accept darkness as a natural part of life, the lighting in Honolulu felt considerably dimmer compared to Tokyo. This is likely due to the strong will of the inhabitants to respect the natural environment and avoid unnecessary brightness.
Moving forward, Honolulu is expected to see continued LED conversion and an increase in
commercial lighting driven by urban redevelopment, such as railway extensions, and rising tourism demand. However, the importance of nature conservation, light pollution countermeasures, and landscape preservation will simultaneously become even more critical. It will be fascinating to see how Hawaii’s lighting culture, which cherishes natural darkness, continues to shape the future of its light environment. (Masashi Kurobe)
