Japan pauses to mark two years since tsunami struck At a memorial service in Tokyo attended by Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, attendees stood in silence at 2:46pm, the precise moment the 9.0-magnitude quake struck off northern Japan on March 11, 2011. The earthquake was the strongest recorded in Japan's history and unleashed a towering wave that wiped out entire coastal communities. Walls of water 13 metres high smashed into Tokyo Electric Power Co's (Tepco) Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant north of Tokyo, knocking out its main power supply, destroying backup generators and crippling the cooling system. Three reactors melted down in the world's worst atomic accident since Chernobyl in 1986. The triple calamities stunned a nation that had thought itself prepared for disasters and been taught to believe that nuclear power, which supplied nearly 30 percent of electricity at the time, was clean, safe and cheap. A panel of experts commissioned by parliament to probe the nuclear crisis dubbed it a man-made disaster resulting from "collusion" among the government, regulators and the plant operator. All told, some 300,000 people remain displaced by the disaster two years later, and virtually no rebuilding has begun.