Eastbound travel, dominated by Japan, set a record of 236,180 visitors for March, up 11.6 percent from last year's 211,880, which also was a record.
"Our eastbound markets - primarily Japan, Korea and Taiwan - continue to drive the growth we've seen in the last year," said Paul Casey, HVB president.
March arrivals from the mainland were up only 0.4 percent to 293,960, compared with 292,680.
But there were some bright spots in the HVB report issued Monday. For example California, Hawaii's single biggest U.S. market for tourists, showed a 5.9 percent increase in arrivals.
Travel from Canada, up 23.8 percent, and Europe, up 11.4 percent, also helped boost overall westbound arrivals to 366,280, a 2.6 percent rise. That brought the tourist total to 602,460 in March, up 6 percent.
Figures from the neighbor islands indicate that the tourist industry is still having difficulty persuading the Japanese and other eastbound visitors to get off Oahu and stay on another island.
Japanese visitors make shorter trips than mainlanders and tend to spend their time on Oahu where they feel the shopping is best.
Eastbound visitors stayed an average 5.8 days last month, four days less than the westbound average.
Eastbound traffic to Maui was down 9 percent, Molokai had only two-thirds the eastbound visitors it had a year earlier and on the Big Island eastbound traffic showed an increase of only half a percentage point.
Kauai was the only neighbor island that did better with eastbound travelers, increasing 10.9 percent, but the number was only about one-tenth of Kauai's total.
Neighbor island travel overall, counting both eastbound and westbound traffic, increased only 0.6 percent.
Kauai did best with an increase of 6.9 percent to 78,390. Lanai, with much smaller numbers, had an increase of 6.2 percent to 7,760. Travel to the Big Island declined 0.9 percent to 94,790. Maui was down 1.2 percent to 195,360 arrivals, while Molokai was off 1 percent to 6,680.
The bigger overall March numbers, despite a slight drop in the average length of stay, resulted in a 5 percent increase in the average number of visitors in the islands on any one day.
The daily census last month was 160,140, compared with 152,500 in March 1995.