The phrase “relentless wall of water” is something of a cliche. However, a cliche isn’t by definition something that is untrue but something that is overused, hackneyed. For me, the most riveting coverage of the Japanese disaster has been the lengthy, usually unnarrated video segments of sea water surging inland, sweeping on and on and on, if not suddenly then eventually scouring away everything in its path. The videos show us what happened, and it was horrific. I know you’ve seen snips on television by now, but television rarely takes time to show the entire record more than, maybe, once. If you haven’t seen one of these clips online, and you want to see for yourself how bad it was, search out a few of them. I don’t recommend them to you as grim entertainment but as an unadorned record of events, photojournalism at its purest.