Not like I stare at webicorders a lot but I was up because of some indigestion and happened to just check on some of the graphs near Mt. St. Helens.....saw the trace, then looked at some other webicorders around the US and saw the same thing....knew there had been a big one somewhere in the world, fairly distant from the US, but didn't know where.....sort of weird waiting to find out where it was for a good 10 minutes.
There was a much larger quake near Niigata in 1964, but it was offshore. It produced a lot of liquefaction damage there (the famous pics of apartment buildings lying on their sides.)
I have a feeling this was really terrible around there but the news reports really haven't filtered through.
NHK is showing a few surveillance camera shots where the camera is obviously shaking (not sure where they were taken, though, because my Japanese comprehension is not that good). The shots that they showed did not look particularly severe (people at a crosswalk apparently do not have difficulty walking, standing, or running), but maybe those images are from a hundred miles away. They are now showing shots of what looks like damage to a highway tunnel, damage to the face of a building (large vertical sign fell off), ceiling collapse in what looks like a workshop or small factory of some sort, etc. which may be from Niigata.
Yeah I just checked the USGS before getting ready to go to sleep and then poked my head back in FR, uhg, but nothing on the world report at the USGS site yet.