NONFICTION - July 28, 1991

KAMIKAZE BIKER: Parody and Anomy in Affluent Japan by Ikuya Sato (University of Chicago: $34.95; 267 pp.). Members of the “Long-Necked Monsters,” “Imprisonment for Life” and other teen gangs, these bikers careen through Japanese city streets clad in “kamikaze party uniforms” and American punk and surfer gear. Most Japanese denounce them as juvenile delinquents, as bosozoku : “the violent driving tribe.” Ibaraki University anthropology professor Ikuya Sato, however, sees the bosozoku not as delinquents threatening his nation’s meticulous sense of order but as enterprising kids fashioning rituals to imbue their lives with meaning and direction. Think not of marauding East L.A. gangs but of that freewheeling West L.A. driver celebrated in Randy Newman’s paean “I Love L.A.”: “Santa Ana winds blowing hot from the north/ and we was born to ride!”

Sato’s chief mentor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describes this exhilarating feeling as “flow,” a state of mind where action and awareness merge and where the “disjointed bits and pieces” of modern life are ordered into a “coherent narrative.” Having lost touch with the rituals and festivals that rationalize their parents’ lives, it is only logical, Sato points out, that Japanese youth would strive to create new ones.

Not all of Sato’s notions are so ingenious. He suggests that L.A. gangs would benefit if they practiced self-mockery, as do the bosozoku , but this neglects the fact that most American gang members, lacking the family support enjoyed by Japanese teens, do not feel secure enough to be so whimsical. Overall, though, “Kamikaze Biker” is a superlative study, one that might help liberate American social science from the simplistic notion that behavior not directly contributing to economic productivity should be summarily dismissed as “dangerous” and “deviant.”