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BBC MUNDO RADIO
- Fires burn debris on top of the tsunami wave
- Many people took video of the damage after the earthquake
- The aftershocks are "like a gigantic theme park ride, except much scarier"
(CNN) -- A sea of sludge and mud carrying wooden planks, trees, houses and cars oozed inland over Japan's eastern coast Friday in the hours after an 8.9 magnitude earthquake jolted the region and caused an unknown amount of death and destruction.
The tsunami wave moved slowly through the Honshu region, one of Japan's most populous. In some places, debris burned paradoxically on top of the water -- flames sparked by heating oil tanks or gas lines that exploded in the shaking of the quake.
After the dirty water pushed through farmlands, villages and cities, trees stripped bare of their leaves lay where they landed, their branches tangled with electrical wires, trash, insulation and foam mattresses; hulking, spiky giants jammed against crumbled buildings and walls of what used to be homes.
The scope of the devastation hasn't even begun to emerge, as rescue crews try to make their way into the wide swath affected by the tsunami and earthquake.
Gallery: Massive quake hits Japan 
Map: 8.9 earthquake hits Japan 
Witness deals with quake terror 
Buildings, windows damaged in Japan The aftershocks are the worst, said Harrison Payton.
"They feel like the entire world is a gigantic theme park ride, except much scarier and with no known end," he wrote to CNN Friday in an iReport from his home in Yabuki-machi, in Japan's Fukushima Prefecture -- only about 180 kilometers, or 110 miles, from the center of the devastating earthquake.
Harrison, like many others, grabbed his phone or video camera and starting recording when the shaking didn't stop after a few minutes.
Mark John Bennett, an American missionary in Narashino, in Chiba Prefecture, taped scenes of water outside his home, about half a mile from the beach of Tokyo Bay.
"The park across from us is flooding, it's from a tidal flood," Bennett said, narrating as he filmed water that seeped up from the ground and then went gushing down the street.
He tilted the camera upward during an aftershock, showing the telephone wires strung across the street dancing wildly from the swaying telephone poles.
"Ah! Here we go! You see how we're moving, back and forth, like an island? Our entire block is moving, like it's an island!" Bennett said, as people around him yelped and shouted.
Amateur video recorded in Rikuzentakata, in Iwate Prefecture, showed a scene that could have been put together by Hollywood's best graphic artists.
iReporter: 'Here's an aftershock' 
Earthquake at Japan's Narita Airport 
iReporter on quake: 'Worst one ever' 
Quake rocks Japan supermarket The images show a small town, wrapped around a mountain-ringed bay, with fog rising off of the sea. You can't even see the water move in. Instead, you see houses lift up and gently ride the crest of the wave until they bump into other homes and buildings, moved by the unseen force of the tsunami and crushed by the weight of each other.
American Zack Philipp serves in the Navy at Yokosuka-shi, in Kanagawa-ken. He was inside a bureaucratic office fixing his vehicle registration when the temblor struck.
"I first thought it was a small quake and that it would end soon. After 15 seconds, I realized this was much larger than what I had experienced before," he told CNN in an iReport.
He saw people running to the street and followed them. That's when he saw that the side of the building had fallen.
"I turned and started walking down the street when I saw the side of the building and how it had fallen. The scene around the building was like very calm, the search and rescue crews seemed to operate at a very calm, collected pace," Philipp explained.
"It's kind of eerie, as there is not much talking. Most people are walking home in silence," he added.
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