The quake that hit Japan is between 800 & 15000 times bigger than the 6.3 that recently trashed Christchurch, they were lucky in ways that it was far out to sea. The 7.1 for which I lived within 15km of centre was bad enough, would hate to think what they experienced.
The thing I hate is that when they quote quake size, in this case 8.9, they do not quote if that was Richtor Scale (log10) or Moment Magnitude Scale (log32). Most of the time it is in the new MMS scale. Either wasy this is a massive massive quake that will have shifted the earths axis a slight amount.
Watching that wall of water come in and turn everything in its path into matchwood for 6 miles was not good. Seeing the cars try to outrun it was difficult watching, you knew you were watching death on a large scale.
Now to top it we have 6 reactor cores without cooling and near meltdown. I also know from experience that they will be in for a year+ of after shocks, in this case bigger than what the people of Canterbury have had to live through.
This is a sad sad day that will get far far worse as as days tick on