World: How Dry They Are

At Tokyo's supermodern Olympic Village last week, drilling crews were digging furiously in four places at once. Storage holes for pole-vault poles, perhaps? No. They were emergency artesian wells. With the 1964 Olympics only eight weeks away, the world's biggest city (pop. 10.6 million) was running out of water, and fast.

Drained by an exploding population, leaky water mains and an abnormal lack of rainfall, Tokyo's reservoirs have been emptying for three months. Even water rationing, mild at first but increasingly drastic, did little to slow the ebb: by last week there were only 4,800,000 tons of water left—less than the city normally consumes in two days.

To make it last, the government all but declared water illegal. Noodle restaurants had to cut down their cooking, bathhouse hours were restricted, swimming pools closed. On the narrow side streets, police water trucks—usually employed to quell riots—filled housewives' buckets with water hauled in from nearby rivers. In the Ginza nightclubs, B-girls pushed dry martinis, urged thirsty tourists to "drink your whiskey without water and help save Tokyo."

Help is on the way. The government is hurrying work on two new canals to bring in more than 1,350,000 tons of water a day from nearby rivers, expects the first to be finished next week. Meantime, Japanese Self-Defense Force planes carrying dry ice and water have pounced on every passing cloud, and on the shores of the Ogochi reservoir, a Shinto priest in the mask of a scarlet lion writhed through a ceremonial rain dance. Townsmen were warned not to expect miracles. "It will take two days for the message to get through to the dragon god," the priest explained.

To chronically parched Hong Kong, Tokyo's problems seem insignificant. Without a river to call its own, Hong Kong depends for most of its water on passing typhoons. A storm in May helped slightly, but the city's faucets were still dry except for four hours every other day. Then last week came Typhoon Ida, which tragically left five dead, thousands homeless, but pushed water storage in reservoirs up to triple last year's levels. The government felt so well off that it boosted the water schedule to an unheard-of eight hours a day.