VANCOUVER - Sam Rose felt the earth trembling beneath him and the building he works in "shaking like a mad dog" Friday, as a massive earthquake devastated Japan.
Rose found himself clinging to a doorway at his Tokyo workplace, wondering if his wife and two children were safe after the magnitude 8.9 quake struck more than 300 kilometres away.
Rose, a B.C. native who is one of approximately 11,000 Canadians who call Japan home, said he took cover as the magnitude hit at 5 in the Japanese capital. The epicentre was off the country's eastern coast, with the coastal city of Sendai hardest hit.
"I went, 'Ooh, this is pretty big. Then you start making your way to a door frame and standing there and then pretty soon the building's really, really shaking," ," he said in a telephone interview with The Canadian Press.
Rose said as the shaking continued, cars halted in the street and earthquake training kicked in.
"Cars stopped, people on the sidewalk moved to the middle of the street, squatting down or whatever and were waiting it out."
There were no Canadians reported among the fatalities, although the list continued to grow throughout the day as early rescue efforts unfolded.
Blaise Plant, a 30-year-old musician who was born in Ottawa and now lives in Sendai, began posting to Twitter soon after the quake struck and has been sending out updates and photos ever since.
"My house is trashed! I'm OK!" Plant wrote in his first posting about the earthquake. "It was spooky. The biggest one yet!!"
But it soon became apparent that the city was not OK.
Plant described "busted up" buildings and massive billboards that were teetering towards collapse. There were fires through the city and the power was out, he wrote, sending the area into complete darkness as night fell.
All the while, "non-stop" aftershocks continued to shake the ground beneath him.
"Currently here with friends still getting massive tremors," wrote Plant. "We are all a little worried right now. Trying to stay calm."
When the quake hit Tokyo, Christina Laffin, a professor at the University of British Columbia who is in Japan for a year, was inside her apartment getting ready to go meet some fellow scholars.
She grabbed her USB drive and her lunch and ran outside -- "probably not the most necessary items in retrospect."
"We waited for what seemed like a very long time, watching the power poles sway," said Laffin, who spent a sleepless night with aftershocks sending her to find refuge again and again.
Like Rose, Canadian Mary Fish, was at work at an international school in Tokyo where she said things tumbled from shelves as the quake shook the ground.
"I guess I was thinking to myself, I was praying to God, I was scared," she told CJME radio.
Although the phone lines in Japan were jammed, Fish was able to contact her parents in Weyburn, Sask.
"They've got the alarm to go off at 7 a.m. and they wake up to the morning news, and the headline, apparently at seven o'clock was 'Massive earthquake strikes Japan,"' she said, adding they were very relieved to hear from her.
Back in Canada, families whose loved ones were overseas tried frantically to get in touch.
Kazuhide Yamane, 34, of Vancouver was weary-eyed and emotional after a long night trying to offer support to his boss, who grew up in Sendai and whose mother still lives there.
"Usually a tsunami makes people go into hiding, so it takes a long time to find all of the people (later). Even after many years they find their bodies," Yamane said, tears welling up in his eyes.
"I hope all the people get back to their families."
A group of high school students from Brighton, Ont., were on a tour bus in Tokyo when the quake hit, but they were safe. The 25 students and five teachers from East Northumberland Secondary School left for Japan two days ago and planned to spend the first three days in Tokyo.
Following the quake, a massive tsunami inflicted more damage and death and put the rest of the Pacific Rim on edge.
Areas of the west coast of British Columbia were put on a tsunami advisory but waves amounted to little more than a ripple.
Evacuations were ordered in the U.S. from California to Washington and some of the Hawaiian Islands sustained some damage.
Jeremy Hainsworth, a Vancouver journalist who arrived for a holiday on the Big Island on Tuesday, said there was a knock on his resort condo door at 10 p.m. local time Thursday and he was told to get out.
"We were just going to bed because we were getting up early this morning and air raid sirens started going off."
He and his family gathered at a mall overlooking the ocean and remained there all night. The sirens went off every hour.
"There's thousands of us here," he said.
Hainsworth said he can't see much from his vantage point, but "we're hearing all kinds of reports though, buildings that are on the waterfront having their lobbies flooded, furniture being washed out to sea, merchandise gone."
He said he was supposed to go scuba diving in a couple days but the building that looks after the operation is gone.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Friday Canada would offer a helping hand to the people of quake-stricken Japan and said Canadians' thoughts and prayers are with people there.
