The Day Today

Tokyo Correspondent:
Thanking you live from Tokyo, where it's three-thirty in the morning. That's minus seven in new Japanese time. In just seven hours, the first of thirty full-size duplicate Japans will be switched on, and all clocks will be reset to 00000. The new Japans have been three years in construction, involving perfect replication of cities and people and children. The raft of new countries, which extends over five thousand miles into the Pacific, has been hidden until now, but was spotted yesterday from an aeroplane. Japan has so far refused to comment.