Tsunami's in themselves are disastrous wherever they strike. But in Japan's case they were a victim of 2 different natural disasters, Japan had made the precautions to protect the public from Primarily Earthquakes and tsunami's but not to this magnitude. That's why it was so catastrophic they were not expecting a 100 year old super quake that was in the making. The earthquake's epicenter was off the coast of Sendai Magnitude of 9.0 the fourth strongest ever recorded, since record keeping was possible on earthquakes in the year 1900.

The Japanese were very prepared for an earthquake at any time. Due to the location of Japan, earthquakes were the norm. Their buildings were made to handle such violent shaking; they even had large walls constructed of concrete to prevent the the ocean from coming in and obliterating infrastructure. Then how did 15,889 deaths, 6,152 injured, and 2,601 people missing, as well as 127,290 totally collapsed buildings occur? To answer that question, lets first understand what KIND of earthquake it was, in layman's terms it was a GIANT rubber band that's been wound up for 200 years, enormous amounts of stress caused by the Pacific Plate pushing into the Eurasian Plate over decades and centuries, pushing the Eurasian Plate downward into the earth. Then all of a sudden at 2:46, Japanese time, 200 years of stress was released all at once, causing a huge ripple in the the earth's crust that jutted across thousands of miles. The main earthquake was preceded by a number of large fore shocks, with thousands of aftershocks reported, leaving around 4.4 million households in northeastern Japan without electricity and 1.5 million without water.