I'm Lauren Taylor. We begin in Japan, where a powerful earthquake and several strong aftershocks have hit the north Coast of the main island of Honshu, destroying buildings and starting fires. In the last half hour, a major tsunami warning, telling people in the coastal noto area to move to higher ground, was downgraded. Tunami warnings have also been issued in South and North Korea and Far East Russia. Japan's meteorological agency says the quake had a magnitude of 7.6. It struck just after 4:00 PM local time, with its epicenter in the Isikawa region, close to the town of Anamizu. Several buildings are reported to have collapsed in the nearby town of Suzu. This CCTV footage appears to show two coming down. You can see clouds of dust forming above the wreckage at the top left and right of the screen, and the roof on the building in the foreground cracking apart. Well, there are reports of people trapped in the rubble of collapsed houses. Some tsunami waves of just over a meter have reached the coastline. These pictures were filmed in nearby Niigata. But there had been fears of waves up to five meters in places. And this video shows the moment the trauma happened inside a supermarket.

The quakers disrupted flights and rail services, and there are reports that some major highways have been closed. More than 36,000 homes have also lost power supplies, but the agency which administers Japan's nuclear power plant says they have not been affected. Well, some images are now emerging of the damage caused by the quake. These buildings in Wajima give an idea of how violent the tremor was. You can see the rubble of what appears to be a collapsed shop at the end of the street. And these pictures show how dozens of roof tiles were dislodged by the quake, with the frames of some of the homes also badly damaged. One tourist who's on a snowboarding trip near Negata, described what the earthquake felt like.

Pretty massive, if you ask me. Though the whole room was shaking, the TV was shaking, I had to keep everything on the table. I did try to save my room, though, but everything else was shaking.

Our Asia correspondent, Rupert Winfield Hayes, is following the story. Rupert, a bit of a downgrade to the warning?

Yes, to the relief of everybody, I think, in Japan, particularly along that Coast, it looks now as if the major threat of a five-metre tsunami has passed. Local authorities there say they have downgraded the tsunami warning from a serious tsunami to still a warning, but of a lower scale threat to the Coast. We are now five hours since the earthquake, the initial earthquake struck. There have been several aftershocks, several of them quite large. But as that time has gone on, the threat has begun to wane. I'm not surprised that they have now downgraded the threat. It appears that a big tsunami is not likely to hit that Coast.

In the meantime, there are quite a bit of damage. Are people being told still to stay away from their homes if they have evacuated?

Well, it's now well into the night in Japan, and people who have evacuated to evacuation centers, which you find in every town in Japan, on high ground, there are strengthened buildings, community centers, or schools that are used as evacuation centers during times of disaster, whether they're earthquake, typhoon, things like that. So people will have moved to those places, and I would expect many of them to stay there through the night until the damage to their properties and to their towns has been fully assessed and then they will probably return begin to return home. But as you say, there has been significant damage. We've seen pictures from one town in the north of the Noto Peninsula where a large fire broke out. It is out of control and it appears to be burning a whole neighborhood. It appears that fire services can't get through to put it out at the moment. We've also seen many older buildings have collapsed in rural areas. This is quite a remote area of Japan. Many fishing communities along that Coast with older buildings, and it will be those that will be worse affected. Also, many roads have been broken up with huge cracks and rippling of the roads, bridges, and a lot of infrastructure has been badly damaged.

I would expect in the coming hours to hear of more injuries and perhaps fatalities from this disaster. But as I said at the beginning, the good news is it looks like the danger from the enlarged tsunami has now passed.

I suppose in the meantime, though, people, as you mentioned, relieved because they would still have memories of the Fukushima disaster, which was triggered by that earthquake back in 2011?

Yes. I spent 10 years living in Japan after the earthquake in 2011, and it affected the country deeply. There was a great deal of collective trauma. Every time an earthquake hit in Tokyo, for example, people would talk about, Oh, it reminded me of the 11th of March 2011. Everybody knows that date. It's burned into their memories. The tsunami that hit after that disaster, which took 18 and a half thousand lives and destroyed a huge swath of the northeast Coast of Japan, is still very fresh in people's memories. It's only 13 years ago. I think today, watching the pictures coming in from Isikawa, many people will have been reminded of that and will have been very, very concerned about the people living up there.

Rupert Winfield Hayes, we're the latest there from Taipei. Thank you very much indeed.