CHANGES IN LATITUDEAn Uncommon Anthropology by Joana...

CHANGES IN LATITUDE

An Uncommon Anthropology

by Joana McIntyre Varawa (Atlantic Monthly Press:

$18.95; 272 pp.) Growing up in Chicago and Los Angeles, Joana Varawa was the classic rebel, dreaming of exotic Polynesia after her mother told her, “Comb your hair--you look like a Fijian,” leaving her marriage (after raising a son) to take a job as harbor master in a small Hawaiian town, and leaving the town when she learned that a restaurant complex was slated to replace her favorite seaside hill. Once making good on her dream of moving to Fiji, however, Varawa realized that if she wanted to stay, she would have to become the ultimate conformist, learning to appreciate a foreign culture despite her inability to accept her own. On one level an account of Varawa’s character reversal, “Changes in Latitude” also has larger relevance as a book about holding onto self-respect despite the loss of familiar moorings and letting go of emotional defenses in order to experience the tumultuous feelings that are part and parcel of new experience.

Flying to Fiji in search of somewhere “bushy and wild,” Varawa arrived in the city of Nadi, some place “hot and sticky.” Soon, however, several “quietly beautiful” Fijian women invited her to their traditional fishing village, where she quickly became enmeshed in heated social dramas, with people she hardly knew telling her where she could go and with whom she could visit. “You stay away from Male, said one suspiciously jealous Fijian woman, “he’s no good,” but Varawa--reacting much as she had to her mother’s advice--found herself attracted to this “fierce, charming man-child.” Not long after Male proposes--suggesting, in broken English, that she can help tame his violent temper--she finds herself saying “yes.”

Varawa soon discovers that Male cannot change; he often orders his new wife around, as is the custom, and resists her attempts to “meddle in his heart . . . to teach him that there is no need for that darkness to enter his eyes, the darkness that blots out thought and reason.” Eventually, though, Varawa overcomes her disappointment, moving onto a private island with Male and settling into a domestic life “of pots filled with fish soup and sleeping dogs and burrowing pigs.”

At one point, she stops to envy the simple lives of two pigs she sees mating: “I wish my mind were as clear as Miss Oink’s, for mine is constantly finding fault with and looking for holes in the fabric of perfection that I would call love. Oh! just to stand still and half close my eyes and, when finished, lie in the shallows cooling my belly or burrow in the cool dirt under the trees, body and soul at rest.” Most of these pages, though, pay tribute to the beautiful complexity of life among Varawa’s own species, from the village’s surprising equality of labor to the cathartic effect of Males anger on their relationship: “Culture is a garment that clothes the soul,” Varawa writes. “We may never be able, or even want, to exchange our cloaks, but what matters is the perception of each other’s realities, even if the reality is hatred.”

THUNDER GODS

The Kamikaze Pilots

Tell Their Story

by Hatsuho Naito

(Kodansha: $18.95; 215 pp.) “Dr. Strangelove,” the movie where a U. S. Air Force base commander attacks the Russians because he believes they are conspiring to fluoridate the Free World’s water, reaches its lunatic height when a bomber pilot bedecked in a cowboy hat manages to release an intractable A-bomb by jumping on it and gleefully riding it like a bronco. The humor of the scene lay in its absurdity, of course, but a similar act was in fact commonplace toward the end of World War II, when a desperate Japan began launching its “Okha” planes, little more than man-guided missiles. Okha pilots would drink the ritual sake, listen to rallying cries cheery enough for a football game (“Keep your eyes open! Peel and dive! Go for it!”), and then fly their blasting-powder-filled planes into enemy ships at speeds approaching 600 miles per hour.

Like some Muslims today, as Asia scholar Boyd de Mente writes in the introduction, the Okha pilots saw death in defense of their country as the noblest possible act. As one pilot wrote his parents, “My body will collapse like a falling cherry blossom, but my soul will live and protect this land forever.” Hatsuho Naito, a former Japanese air corps officer who helped engineer the Okha, captures the spirits prevailing among the pilots with unprecedented intimacy in these pages, though the book’s technical passages about the Okha’s design often fall flat next to Naito’s moving stories of a bomber crew surviving fiery and icy water after a crash at sea or of a bitter vice admiral leading a suicide attack on the enemy six days after Japan’s surrender. More problematic is Naito’s conclusion that the Okha program was “futile” and “self-destructive,” the conversion of “individual insanity to organized insanity,” for while certainly abhorrent, the program seemed successful in the cold terms of war strategy: The suicide missions killed roughly 12,300 U. S. servicemen and wounded about 36,400; all told, however, only 3,913 Japanese pilots died.

Most of Naito’s claims are highly persuasive, however, such as his argument that a single young lieutenant did not design the Okha on his own, as legend has it. This argument--suggesting that the lieutenant was used to deflect public criticism--is one of several in these pages that have already provoked strong denunciations from the Japanese government.

THE SILENT WAR

America’s Struggle

for World Markets

by Ira C. Magaziner

and Mark Patinkin

(Random House: $19.95; 395 pp.)

The title is apt, for the economic wars shaping world power today are so quiet that most Americans do not see the difference between their mental image of an America grown stronger at home and abroad under Reagan and the hard realities: increasingly dangerous trade imbalances (in 1973, America imported only 9% of our goods and exported the same; by 1988 we were importing almost a third of all cars, over half of all machine tools, over 65% of all radios, TVs and stereos); falling salaries (West Germans who 15 years ago were making two-thirds of our average income are now a third ahead); and, of course, growing debt (In 1982, the world owed us $140 billion; by early 1988, we owed the world $420 billion).

Ira Magaziner’s strategy for reversing this decline is essentially the same as that propounded in other recent business books--invest more in long-term research and development and implement high technology more quickly--but his arguments have polish and verve, and they don’t come merely from 20/20 hindsight, as is the case with many authors in this genre: In the mid-1970s, Magaziner correctly predicted that America would suffer from its failure to modernize as quickly as many Asian and European countries. Here, he and his journalist co-author take a similar tack, urging American business leaders to overcome their fears by illustrating how foreign countries have been profiting from slow yielding investments and government-aided research.

“The Silent War” is not immune from the most common problem plaguing the business book genre: a tendency for clear writing to become muddled when the time comes to suggest specific solutions. The authors call for more research funding, but don’t suggest funding sources (the great majority of America’s research and development budget now goes to the military, even though few believe that its advances “trickle down” to help civilian technologies); they offer no effective solutions on how we can compete with companies based in low-wage countries such as Brazil (lauding one General Electric attempt to compete with Brazil, they fail to mention that it is $350 million in the red); and they devote only one prescriptive paragraph to the delicate subject of government intervention.

Overall, though, this is a well-argued guide to reorienting our factories--and our minds--in order to at least hold our ground in the “silent wars” of the 1990s.

ABOUT FACES

The Evolution of the Human Face

by Terry Landau (Doubleday: $29.95; 294 pp.) A clever way of reviewing the latest theories about human physiological and psychological development (for the face reflects both our culture and our nature), “About Faces” travels back in time to illustrate our ancestors’ facial features (new reconstruction techniques reveal an alien mien, neither apelike nor human) and forward thousands of years, to an age when our eyes and ears might have grown larger to reflect their increased importance. TV producer Terry Landau sometimes spends too much time reporting the obvious (e.g., “We seem to have a mental model for famous faces”) and too little examining innovations, such as genetic engineering, that are bound to change our visage dramatically. She surveys an impressively wide range of thought, though, from social scientists who claim that you can judge a person by his or her “cover” to Picasso, who would often paint faces from memory alone because he believed that the most accurate images lay in the subjectivity of his mind’s eye.