Japan's meteorological agency issued a tsunami alert for Japan's Pacific coast, upgrading an earlier advisory stemming from the powerful, magnitude 8.7 quake that hit on Wednesday morning near Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.

The agency issued an advisory for a tsunami of up to three metres across the Pacific coast of Japan, possibly starting to arrive along the northern Japanese coasts in less than half an hour after the alert.

A tsunami warning also was extended to the U.S. state of Hawaii, with the U.S. National Weather Service's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center saying a tsunami from the quake had been generated that could cause damage along the coastlines of all the Hawaiian islands.