Typhoon Dolphin lashed Okinawa Prefecture on Saturday, injuring five people and cutting power to 14,000 buildings. [1] The Japan Times published the Tokyo and Beijing dateline the same day. [1] Injuries and outages are Saturday impact records. Chinese landfall is still future.

The storm sat about 160 kilometers northwest of Kume Island at noon, moving northwest at 15 kilometers per hour, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. [1] Maximum sustained winds were 162 kilometers per hour. Gusts reached 216. [1] Five elderly people suffered non-life-threatening injuries. Three of them fell in the wind, the Okinawa Prefectural Government said. [1] ANA and Japan Airlines canceled flights to the region. [1] Okinawa and Amami island in Kagoshima Prefecture were the main Japanese areas expected to be hit. [1] No death was in the Saturday file. [1]

Fourteen thousand dark buildings is the household number. It is larger than the five injuries and smaller than a prefecture. It is also the fact regional desks will underplay once the storm's next map lights up Zhejiang. Write the outage first.

China shut ports and ferry routes ahead of an expected arrival on its east coast. [1] The China National Meteorological Centre said Dolphin was expected to make landfall between late Sunday and early Monday, most likely between Zhoushan in Zhejiang and Fuding in Fujian, with winds of 38 to 45 meters per second near the center. [1] Rain and strong winds were forecast through August 12, including parts of Shanghai. Some areas of eastern Zhejiang could receive more than 600 millimeters of rain. [1] Expected is the verb. Do not move the landfall into Saturday.

Zhejiang raised its coastal typhoon alert to the highest level, halted port operations, and suspended 162 passenger ferry routes. [1] Ningbo Lishe International Airport said it would halt operations from 11:30 p.m. Saturday and suspend all Sunday flights. [1] Shanghai's Yangshan port had been cleared of vessels by late Friday. Some rail services in the Yangtze River Delta were to be suspended from Sunday. [1] In Taiwan, 63 international flights were canceled. Heavy rain was expected in the north. Authorities had not ordered evacuations as of Saturday. [1]

China ordered ships in the Taiwan Strait to heed its traffic-control instructions. Taipei called the measures "ridiculous" and said Beijing has no right to restrict access to international waters. [1] China claims the strait. Taipei and Washington reject the claim. [1] That sentence is a political sidebar. It is not the Okinawa outage. Do not let it swallow the island.

Regional MSM files a storm-and-ports note. X was thin. The paper's gap is household Saturday — 14,000 dark buildings, five elderly injured, flights canceled — versus a sovereignty argument about a strait the storm has not yet crossed. A newspaper that covered only Zhejiang's alert would tell readers China was already under the eye. A newspaper that covered only the strait dispute would tell readers the weather was a pretext. Saturday printed an island without power and a forecast. Write the island.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo