Tokyo

TOKYO - Facing a summer power crunch, some Tokyo city government employees began working an hour earlier Monday to conserve energy amid shortages caused by damage to a tsunami-hit nuclear plant. City workers on the earliest shift will start at 7:30 a.m. and be allowed to leave at 4:15 p.m. By better exploiting the early daylight hours this summer, city officials hope to use less air-conditioning and less office lighting at night. "It should be a good thing, and it doesn't require any cost," Tokyo's outspoken Gov. Shintaro Ishihara said Friday.

The Philadelphia Orchestra came home to Tokyo yesterday. "Home" is a movable concept to an orchestra on tour, and after five days traveling from Tokyo to Kurashiki, Osaka and Nagoya, the return to the city where the orchestra had begun its Japanese tour 10 days earlier seemed a genuine homecoming. The feeling was reinforced for those players who found themselves back in the same rooms they had occupied during their first six days in Japan. The orchestra had left Tokyo touched by the death in Philadelphia of its executive director, Stephen Sell; it returned buoyant at the news that general manager Joseph H. Kluger had been appointed Sell's successor.

In this wildly comic film that's part Taxi and part Taxi Driver, cabbie Chung Nam is a second-generation Korean in Tokyo, making his way in a land that celebrates ethnic purity. An outsider in his adopted country and a stranger to his own, Chung is in the position of navigating streets that natives get lost in and serving people who say they dislike Koreans, but will make an exception of him. To cap off his isolation from the mainstream, Chung is in love with a Filipina bar girl who works for his mother.

We're going to be flying to Tokyo for the start of a vacation in the Orient. We're pretty sure we want to fly nonstop, but we'd like to know just how many hours we'd be in the air. Can you tell us which airlines fly to Tokyo and how long the trip takes? The majority of flights to Tokyo these days are nonstop. Flying time from New York is about 14 hours; from Chicago, 12 3/4 hours; from San Francisco, 11 hours; from Los Angeles, 11 1/2 hours, and from Seattle, 10 hours. The return flights - because of the vagaries of tailwinds, and so forth - are shorter: about 12 1/2 hours to New York, 11 1/2 to Chicago, 8 3/4 to San Francisco, 9 1/2 to L.A. and 8 1/2 to Seattle.

Three short films set in Tokyo but made by foreigners - Frenchmen Michel Gondry and Leos Carax, and South Korea's Bong Joon-ho - Tokyo! finds xenophobes and freaks wandering the streets of Japan's capital, grappling with alienation and ennui, horror and regret, toilet paper and pizza boxes. Without doubt the standout, Gondry's "Interior Design" tracks a young couple as they hunt for an apartment, staying in the claustrophobic flat of a friend while seeking employment and a space they can afford.

You don't have to know psychology, sociology or musicology to figure out why New York City has such a reputation for turning out aggressive string players with nervous vibratos. Conversely, is it any surprise that, in our more easygoing surroundings, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society opened its season at the Pennsylvania Convention Center this week with ensembles whose hallmarks are a cultivated, unforced sound? Philadelphia audiences don't tire of the Tokyo String Quartet, which the society has presented regularly for 12 years, or of the relatively young Brentano String Quartet, which is on its third visit.

A cross between Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend and a Chevy Chase National Lampoon's Vacation movie, Mitsuo Kurotsuchi's Traffic Jam examines contemporary Japanese society through the eyes of a Tokyo electronics salesman and his family - and finds the society sorely lacking. Fujimura (Kenichi Hagiwara), his wife and their young son and daughter embark on a five-day vacation to visit his parents, but as soon as they hit the freeway they face gridlock. Things go from bad to worse - wrong turns, detours, a collision with a pig truck - as what promised to be a pleasant few days tooling through Japan turns into a road trip from hell.

Probably the first thing that will happen to you at "Tokyo: Form and Spirit" is that you will get lost. That's partly because the exhibition, which originated at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, has been squeezed into the disorienting, subterranean space at the IBM Gallery of Science and Art here, where it will be on view through Feb. 7. But it is mostly intentional. Tokyo is a sprawling city, one whose urban structure is not readily apparent. It stands at the center of a society that, while notoriously inward-looking and convinced of its cultural superiority, seems at the same time to be absorbing popular culture from everywhere.

When the United Kingdom changes the rules on stock trading tomorrow, the British expect a "Big Bang" to echo around the world as London battles for supremacy in international markets. But here, the Big Bang is being billed as nothing more than a "Little Fizzle. " The financial world still spins on an axis around Wall Street. More stocks change hands here than anywhere else in the world. Consider: The market value of stocks listed on the New York and American stock exchanges amounted to $1.9 trillion at the end of 1985, more than five times the $353 billion in stocks on the London Stock Exchange.

Sori Yanagi, 96, whose designs for stools and kitchen pots brought the simplicity and purity of Japanese decor into the everyday, died Sunday at a Tokyo hospital, Koichi Fujita of Yanagi Design Office said Monday. Mr. Yanagi's curvaceous "butterfly stool," evocative of a Japanese shrine gate, won an award at La Triennale di Milano in 1957 and helped elevate him to international stature. The work later joined the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris.

OGATSU, Japan - The slender woman in a puffy black ski hat and camouflage pants hurried among the crowd at the opening ceremony for a vegetable market here, carrying a rolled-up events schedule like an architect with a set of building plans. Her cellphone never stopped ringing. Between smoking breaks, she dragged tables and ran to consult village elders, playing coordinator. Chizuru Nakagawa isn't a resident of Ogatsu. Rather, she's the volunteer stranger who came and stayed.

TOKYO - Director Yoshimitsu Morita, whose films depicted the absurdity and vulnerability of everyday life in conformist Japan, has died. He was 61. Morita, who won international acclaim over his prolific 30-year career, died Tuesday of acute liver failure at a Tokyo hospital, said Yoko Ota, spokeswoman at Toei Co., the film company behind his latest work. Morita's movies were distinctly Japanese, depicting the fragile beauty of the nation's human psyche and visual landscape while daringly poking fun at its ridiculous tendency for rigid bureaucracy and ritualistic hierarchy.

The stock market buckled Monday under the weight of a crisis in Europe and danger of recession at home. Reeling from a downgrade of American debt, the Dow Jones industrials plunged 634 points. It was the worst day for the market since fall 2008 and extended Wall Street's sudden, sharp decline. Stocks have lost 15 percent of their value in just 21/2 weeks. Monday was the first trading day since Standard & Poor's downgraded the United States' risk-free credit rating, and the selling started at the opening bell.

TOKYO - Facing a summer power crunch, some Tokyo city government employees began working an hour earlier Monday to conserve energy amid shortages caused by damage to a tsunami-hit nuclear plant. City workers on the earliest shift will start at 7:30 a.m. and be allowed to leave at 4:15 p.m. By better exploiting the early daylight hours this summer, city officials hope to use less air-conditioning and less office lighting at night. "It should be a good thing, and it doesn't require any cost," Tokyo's outspoken Gov. Shintaro Ishihara said Friday.

TOKYO - Hiroshi Miura and a dozen other taxi drivers dressed in crisp blue shirts were shooting the breeze in front of the quiet Tokyo Bay Hotel at dusk. They had one thing on their minds: "X Day. " "That's the day Disney is going to reopen," said Miura, lamenting how he has lost at least two-thirds of his fares since Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo Disney Sea shut down after Japan's March 11 earthquake and tsunami. "They're going to post a notice five days before 'X Day' on their website announcing what day they are starting operations.

On Monday, in a cosmic confluence of events, in Japan nuclear reactors toiled and bubbled, at Three Mile Island a vigil marked the 32d anniversary of the nuclear meltdown there, and in federal court Barry Bonds' ex-mistress testified about steroid abuse and the wages of sin. Makes you think those bearded guys holding "The End Is Near" signs might be on to something. Setting aside the withering revelation about one of baseball's greatest players, let us try to understand what is happening in Fukushima and not panic.

TOKYO - Nearly two weeks of rolling blackouts, distribution problems and contamination fears prompted by a leaking, tsunami-damaged nuclear plant have left shelves stripped bare of some basic necessities in stores across Tokyo. Some people are even turning to the city's ubiquitous vending machines to find increasingly scarce bottles of water. At the source of the anxiety - the overheated, radiation-leaking nuclear plant - there was yet another setback yesterday as two workers were injured when they stepped into radiation-contaminated water.

TOKYO - Radiation leaking from Japan's tsunami-damaged nuclear-power plant has caused Tokyo's tap water to exceed safety standards for infants to drink, officials said yesterday, sending anxiety levels soaring over the nation's food and water supply. Residents cleared store shelves of bottled water after Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara said levels of radioactive iodine in tap water were more than twice what is considered safe for babies. Officials begged those in the city to buy only what they needed, saying that hoarding could hurt the thousands of people without any water in areas devastated by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

NAKANOSAWA, Japan - They covered the body with a children's blanket, a fluffy blue-green cloth decorated with white lilies. Beneath it was a man, maybe in his 40s, missing his right arm from the elbow - a final insult to one of the countless victims of this agricultural town's tsunami nightmare. On a warm late-winter morning, four recovery workers bent low, slowly lifting the corpse in silent deference before splashing through the muck and ooze of the rural rice field toward the road.