watching the video is so gut-wrenching. The shot from the air as the water encroaches on acre after acre of farm land, and the debris in the water had been people’s homes, cars, trucks, etc.
It’s a good thing the Japanese people have the ethic they do (vs. say, Haiti). They will rebuild, and damage, however horrific, will be less because of precautions they have taken over the past few decades.
Every now and then they break into the broadcast with an "earthquake early warning" (kinkyuu jishin?) to alert viewers that a significant aftershock has occurred, and they give a rough location and identify the prefectures at risk - it may provide viewers a few seconds to take cover. It's chilling...
The sun is starting to rise, finally, and they are showing aerial photos of the destruction.
I too have been up most of the night watching this, some of the most gut wrenching video is of seeing waves of cars trying to go under a freeway overpass in the wave, and you see cars with wipers and flashers on, of another image of a car or a truck trying to outrace the wave at very high speed, all of a sudden it stops when the wave cuts them off, and then the chopper video ends.
And the fishing boats trying to climb over the wave, you see a massive belch of diesel smoke as the captain firewalls the throttles to point the bow near vertical, again we lose sight of the vessel.