TOKYO — Television personality Hugh Downs went to the roof of a Tokyo department store Saturday to do one of the last shows on his nine-year "Today" program, firmly denying that he is giving up the video screen for good.

"I'm positively abandoning the idea of getting up at four in the morning," Downs, 50, told Pacific Stars and Stripes as early morning traffic pulsed beneath the rooftop amusement park of the Daimaru Department Store, which has shops and offices in the Tokyo Railway Station. He emphasized he is "positively not getting out of the business" — only passing the reins to successor Frank McGee and confining his own television work to an occasional special.

"It's been a long commitment," Downs said of the NBC show. "Maybe I could do it another five or 10 years before it affected my health but — well, it's tiring and it takes too much time. I want to do some other things."

Downs, who says he has logged more hours before a television camera than any other individual ("Put it all together and it would amount to a year and a half, day and night"), told an interviewer that he has been accepted as a visiting fellow at the Center for Study of Democratic Institutions at Santa Barbara, Calif., and is also working on three books. Two are on "deep and probing" subjects like human maturity and ecology

"I hope to start living like a human being again," Downs said. "I want to get out of early broadcasting. Too many times, when I go on vacation, I get a tinge of nostalgia. I tell myself, 'This is the way it was before, when I was really living.' "

Dapper, tired, stained with makeup, Downs swung into his show. He and co-star Barbara Walters interviewed author-educator Chie Nakane, who told them that massive Westernization of Japan was largely veneer and that the Japanese personality and character would remain as they are.

Robert A. G. Strickland, an ex-U.S. Navy man who has spent 20 years here, said that he made slow but firm personal friendships but that Japanese bitterly mistrust foreign businessmen because they fear competition and loss of their mystical image abroad.

Once taped, the shows were rushed by jetliner to New York.

This, Downs said, is what he is seeking — introspective documentary and not a flat and stagy travelogue.

"It's a challenge to show a country as it really is," Downs said. "Not through a travelogue approach, but a window to the world. We're trying to select people who represent expertise — politicians, sports figures, everybody."

Downs, Miss Walters and sports commentator Joe Garagiola arrived here from New York last week and on Monday boarded a blue-nosed bullet train for Kyoto. There they began five shows on the theme, "Japan — Past, Present, Future."

Garagiola provided many chuckles Saturday, both on and off camera. Rehearsing a short bit in which he walks among Japanese department store goods with humorous commentary, Garagiola glared with annoyance and suspicion at a chained but unruly monkey he feared might bite him. "Stay away from him, Joe," an engineer advised before the scene was taped.

Garagiola couldn't. Pointing out gnarled bonsai trees, dishes of realistic-looking plastic foods displayed in restaurant windows and a kind of automated dustpan used by people who walk dogs, Garagiola then moved onto a small menagerie of pets for sale — a goat, a cage full of marmots, a weasel cat and the monkey, who suddenly grasped Garagiola's lapels and began using him for a climbing pole. Garagiola kept his head and went into comic banter: "Whoa, boy, come on. I'm doing a single and you want to do a double. Let's go." With effort, he shook the monkey loose and went on with his commentary. The engineer jabbed his fist to salute Garagiola for spontaneous showmanship.

Before that, Garagiola posed before a large image of Tanuki, the leering badger who stands before sake shops and is regarded as a symbol of virility in Japan. Told of this, Garagiola walked away muttering: "I've got better ways of showing my virility than that."

On Sunday, Downs interviewed Ryokichi Minobe, Tokyo's controversial, avowedly Marxist governor, and also spoke with a panel of Japanese and foreign newsmen. The troupe was in Hiroshima Monday to tape the Peace Park and other spots. Downs' last "Today" show, in New York, will follow on Oct. 13 — the day his long contract runs out.