I was looking at the usgs data last night, so it is quite nice to see somebody else made a visualization of the data. I looked at usgs, and was quite surprised to see there were over 100 >5 magnitude earthquakes off the coast of japan in the past week. Most seemed to be relatively shallow (10-20km), so i can't imagine what it must be like there right now. This isn't something I've read about in the papers, and I can't imagine why not. A single one of these aftershocks would be noteworthy in Seattle, and it appears these are hapening nearly every hour. Incredible.
Not just nearly every hour, around every 20 minutes there's an aftershock. Most of which would be a magnitude that'd make the news here in the US no matter where it happened. It's just mind boggling that there's been over 500 of them now and it's not really slowing it seems.
As NZ_Matt pointed out, most of the quakes's epicenters are offshore. The strength of the shake decreases rapidly with distance. In Tokyo it's still bad but not as bad as it might appear on the map. Sometimes it's like this:
A: "So we need to add one table to the database and"
B: "Wait."
A: "What?"
B: "It's shaking."
A: "Oh, is it? ... Ah, yeah"
B: "OK now. So what about the backups?"
On the other hand, the bigger aftershocks were grade 3 or 4 (in the Japanese scale) in Tokyo, which ranges from "shaking noticeably" to "shaking quite a lot". Personally, I don't feel scared anymore because I'm pretty sure both my apartment and my office won't crumble. Still, it's quite stressful.
Oh, you probably haven't read it in the (English-language) papers because they're too busy talking about the impending "nuclear winter".
