Disturbance plays a role in maintaining diversity by temporally and spatially disrupting biological communities through thinning and successive transitions. Particularly, disturbances that have a broad impact and strong force but occur infrequently are said to generate mosaic landscapes at large spatial scales. This is because the response of communities to disturbance and the spatial distribution of survivors are not spatially uniform, depending on the spatial variability of intensity of the disturbance and vulnerability of organisms involved. However, the patterns and processes of spatial variability in community responses to large infrequent natural disturbances, and the resulting spatial heterogeneity in community structure, are not well understood. As a case study of community response to such large infrequent natural disturbance, we investigated changes in rocky intertidal community structure before and after the 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake at 24 sites along a 30 km coastline directly impacted by the earthquake and addressed the following three questions: 1) how the spatial variation in community structure changes before and after the earthquake as a community-level impact of the earthquake, 2) how the spatial variability in the community-level impact is influenced by the intensity of the disturbance and differences in sensitivity among species, and 3) how the spatial heterogeneity of community structure changes as a result. We will present the findings about these questions.