On their way to a May Day parade, twins Hue and Hoa spy a confused-looking duck and try to help it reach the pond, while neighbors from many countries offer help and greetings in different languages.

Rampant crime and government ineptitude continue to cripple the city's recovery, with outside profiteers looking to cash in on short-term gains. The series' focus is still on ordinary people, but they no longer accept their lack of influence on the institutions that have controlled the city.

Mikio Kobayashi lives quietly with his wife, daughter, and divorced sister in downtown Tokyo, where xenophobic neighbors insist they attend community watch meetings, and the only recent excitement is the disappearance of a pet parrot. One day Kagawa appears, claiming to be the son of a financier who once helped Kobayashi's company. Kagawa soon ingratiates himself as a live-in employee and proceeds to comically turn the Kobayashi's monotonous life...

A sleepy Los Angeles exurb and its shiftless young residents are seen through the eyes of two Japanese tourists in an intimate evocation of a small town in Southern California where everyone's talking but no one really understands.

Amid the ruins of New Orleans, ordinary people--musicians, chefs, residents--find themselves clinging to a unique culture and wondering if the city that gave birth to that culture still has a future.

When an aspiring doctor loses the one woman in his life to a tragic and untimely death, he goes off to Europe to forget. While he's gone, his friend Drake loses his inherited fortune and his fiance. He takes up with a woman "from the wrong side of the tracks" and an ensuing accident leaves him a cripple. When Cummings, now a full-fledged doctor returns home, it takes everything he has ever learned and experienced to put things right again.