Dave left a link in his last comment directing me to the NOAA tsunami animation on YouTube. I have embedded an updated narrated version of it here. I don’t know if wave tables are still used in science classrooms but the animation reminded me very much of what you see on a wave table. It shows the disturbance radiating out from the epicenter and then reflecting off of islands, diffraction patterns through ocean passages, and the interference patterns that develop between them all.
I also followed some links that I hadn’t taken time to follow before. This IRIS webpage has a number of good documents and animations that visually explain some of the phenomena and mechanisms involved in this particular earthquake. One of interest to me was an animation of the seismic waves (Ground Motion Visualization) traversing a large array of seismometers in the United States called USArray. It shows the first arrivals out of the northwest, along the great circle back to the Honshu region followed by a quiescent period. Then the surface waves following the long path along the great circle arrive out of the southeast. The arrivals are identified by the moving cursor in the sample seismogram under the map. The station that recorded the seismogram is shown in the center of the map.
These animations are quite large and take some time to download on slower internet connections (like I have) but are worth the wait.