There are some interesting results from the Japanese earthquake of March 11th 2011. According to http://wwwearthquake.renesysusgs.comgov/blogearthquakes/2011recenteqsww/03Quakes/japan-quake.shtmlusc0001xgp.phpl the big (8.9) one was Friday, March 11, 2011 at 05:46:23 UTC.
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However as can be seen from the map below, we were not monitoring a Japanese host near the epicenter.
Tohoku University (www.tohoku.ac.jp), which we were not monitoring previously, on the outskirts of Sendai was not responding on 3/12/2011 12:46pm PST.
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It looks the problem is in the route to Japan not within Japan itself. I wonder if the undersea earthquake has disrupted some cables? This appears to be in line with the information from [http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/03/japan-quake.shtm|http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/03/japan-quake.shtml]
Routes
Comparing the routes from SLAC to RIKEN (ping.riken.jp) and from SLAC to NET.APAN.N2 (ns.jp.apan.net) we see RIKEN has more hops and goes Eastwards via the Avenue of the Americas in NY, while APAN goes directly via Sunnyvale near SLAC and then via Pacific Wave directly to Japan. The traceroutes from SLAC to the University of OSAKA and the University of TOKYO are similar to traceroute from SLAC to RIKEN.