The Tōhoku tsunami

A magnitude nine earthquake off the coast moved the main island of Japan eight feet east and dropped the coastline by up to a metre. The wave arrived about forty minutes later, in places forty metres high, and went ten kilometres inland.

Nearly twenty thousand people were killed or never found. Entire towns were removed.

In Minamisanriku, a twenty-four-year-old town employee named Miki Endo stayed at the disaster prevention office microphone broadcasting the evacuation warning as the water came up the building. Her voice is on recordings made by people running for high ground. About ten thousand of the town's seventeen thousand people got out. She did not.

At Fukushima Daiichi the plant lost its power and its cooling. Workers stayed on site in the dark, in shifts, venting and flooding reactors by hand.

Japan's response was unhurried, orderly and largely local, and it is remembered as much for that as for the wave.