The earthquake lasted six minutes. That alone made it extraordinary -- most earthquakes are measured in seconds. At 2:46 PM on Friday, March 11, 2011, the Pacific seafloor east of the Oshika Peninsula lurched upward as the magnitude 9.0 megathrust rupture propagated along the Japan Trench, releasing energy that would shift Honshu eight feet eastward and knock Earth's axis 6.5 inches off center. Schools were in session. Trains were running. Fishermen were at sea. Within the hour, waves reaching over 40 meters high in some locations would obliterate entire coastal towns, push the ocean six miles inland, and set in motion a nuclear disaster that would reshape global energy policy. The seismologists had been watching the wrong fault.
Japan had invested billions of dollars in anti-tsunami seawalls lining at least 40 percent of its coastline, some standing over 10 meters tall. The wave climbed over them. In places it simply collapsed the walls entirely. The tsunami struck Sendai Airport at 3:55 PM, turning runways into rivers. It destroyed the northeastern ports of Hachinohe, Sendai, Ishinomaki, and Onahama. At Matsushima Air Field, all 18 Mitsubishi F-2 fighter jets of the 21st Fighter Training Squadron were damaged -- twelve scrapped outright, the remaining six repaired at a cost exceeding their original price. A total of 121,778 buildings were completely collapsed, 280,926 half-collapsed, and another 699,180 partially damaged. An estimated 230,000 vehicles were destroyed. The single crematorium in Higashimatsushima could handle four bodies per day. Hundreds were found there. Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan called it the most difficult crisis Japan had faced in the 65 years since World War II.
The earthquake struck during the school day. One hundred thousand children were uprooted from their homes; 236 were orphaned across the prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima. At Okawa Elementary School in Ishinomaki, poor evacuation decisions cost 74 of 108 students and 10 of 13 teachers their lives. In all, 378 students from elementary through high school were killed and 158 remain missing. The official death toll eventually reached nearly 20,000, with 65.8 percent of victims over age 60. The thousands of bodies overwhelmed crematoriums and morgues, many of which had been damaged themselves. Each cremation required 50 liters of kerosene, and supplies were short. Governments and the military were forced to bury the dead in hastily dug mass graves, promising families that proper cremation would follow. Snow fell across the devastated coast within minutes of the tsunami, coating ruins in white and further hampering rescue efforts.
Eleven nuclear reactors across four power stations automatically shut down when the earthquake struck. The emergency diesel generators needed to power backup cooling systems kicked in as designed. Then the tsunami arrived. At Fukushima Daiichi, waves overtopped the seawalls and destroyed the backup power systems. Without cooling, three reactors suffered meltdowns. Explosions tore through reactor buildings. Radiation levels inside the plant spiked to 1,000 times normal. Over 200,000 people were evacuated. Radioactive iodine was detected in tap water as far away as Tokyo. Radioactive caesium contaminated soil across Fukushima Prefecture. The disaster was worse than Three Mile Island, though less severe than Chernobyl. By 2019, only nine of Japan's 42 operable reactors had been restarted. The meltdowns fundamentally changed Japan's relationship with nuclear energy and forced a nationwide reckoning: peak electricity consumption in the summer of 2011 dropped 18 percent as the country embraced conservation measures known as setsuden.
The power crisis exposed an infrastructure quirk dating to the 1880s: Japan had never unified its electrical grid. Eastern Japan runs on 50 hertz; western Japan on 60 hertz. Only two frequency-conversion substations existed, with a combined capacity of just 1 gigawatt. Kansai Electric Power could not share electricity with the devastated northeast. Steel manufacturers stepped in, with Sumitomo Metal Industries, JFE Steel, and Nippon Steel contributing up to 1,400 megawatts from their own in-house power plants. Auto factories switched to weekend operations so weekday power could go to households. Rolling blackouts of approximately three hours swept through the greater Tokyo area from mid-March through May. Rail service dropped to 10-to-20-minute intervals instead of the usual 3-to-5 minutes, paralyzing the capital. Twenty thousand stranded visitors spent the night of March 11 inside Tokyo Disneyland.
The tsunami produced an estimated five million tonnes of debris. Over the following years, plastic, styrofoam, and wreckage drifted across the Pacific, washing ashore on the coasts of Canada and the United States and increasing litter along the American west coast by a factor of ten. In April 2015, authorities off Oregon discovered debris thought to be from a boat destroyed during the tsunami -- its cargo of yellowtail amberjack, a species native to Japanese waters, still alive inside. More than one million tonnes of debris are estimated to remain in the Pacific Ocean. Back in Japan, the reconstruction of the Tohoku coast focused on building higher seawalls, despite evidence that the 2011 walls had been largely ineffective. The UN held its World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Tohoku in March 2015, producing the Sendai Framework -- a document that shifted international disaster policy from reaction to prevention. Japan's coastline is different now: higher walls, fewer towns, and stone markers placed at the tsunami's high-water line so that future generations will know where the sea once reached.
The epicenter is located at 38.32°N, 142.37°E in the Pacific Ocean, approximately 70 kilometers east of the Oshika Peninsula. From the air, the Tohoku coastline between Sendai and Miyako shows extensive evidence of reconstruction -- new seawalls, reorganized coastal towns, and memorial sites. Sendai Airport (RJSS) was famously flooded by the tsunami and is the major air facility in the region. The Sanriku ria coastline north of Sendai features deep inlets that funneled and amplified the tsunami. At cruising altitude, the flat Sendai Plain shows the boundary between the rebuilt coast and the inland areas. The Fukushima Daiichi plant site is visible approximately 100 kilometers south along the coast. Best viewed at 5,000-10,000 feet AGL to appreciate the scale of coastal reconstruction.