Did the earth move for you?

Within 7 hours of arriving in Tokyo my husband, our son, two of his mates and myself experienced our first earthquake. We have both been through tremours in Darwin that made our stilt house rattle a bit (mainly from the Mt Pinatubo eruptions in the early 1980s) but nothing like the scale of Friday.
  At first it was like the rattle and hum of an old elevator that grumbles and groans within its bricks and mortar confines, but it quickly progressed into a full on wall shaking rumble. You could actually see the room (and hence the whole building) moving to and fro. At this point I thought of my favourite Jurasic Park quote delivered by the cool and unflappable Jeff Goldblum, “First there’s oooing, then there’s ahhing, then there’s running, then there’s screaming.”   At what point do we run screaming from the building? Do we stand in a doorway? Get under a table? It was the first time in a long time that I felt completely helpless as I realised none of the above options would have made the slightest difference. The shaking subsided and we eventually returned to our holiday mode.   Later in the bar I asked our barman what should we have done? When do they take the shaking serious? His typically stoic Japanese reply was, “No point – when the shaking is too big it’s too late.”  Insightful but not very comforting.
Okay so now our family’s natural disaster record is: 3 cyclones, 2 bushfires, 1 mega flood and an earthquake. Don’t think we will venture too close to Mt Fuji – just in case.