Well, I was in CA during the 1989 earthquake. I was walking home from high school when it hit. I almost fell down because the side to side motion was so intense. Cars were shaking on the street and car alarms were going off.
At 2:50ish today (I am in Nagoya, Japan now) my 6 story apartment building was moving back and forth. Nagoya is not near the epicenter of todays quake. I would estimate the shaking scale to be around 5.0 in our area. But near Tokyo is was much much more. The tidal waves or tsunamis as a result were between 3-6 meters (3-6 yards approx) high. What makes then so bad is that they are NOT a wall of water. Imagine the ocean tide rising between 3-6 meters in height. It basically floods all the low lands near the coast. Also, the shaking caused many building fires as stoves and heaters fell down... seeing how we are in winter time here. Near Tokyo and norther japan it was much more ugly than where we are. Nobody I know of has been hurt, but the news here reports ~70 dead so far. Imagine the Hurricane near New Oreleans and multiply that by 10. That is about the size of the damage caused by the flooding. They will be cleaning up for a while...