My take on the Japanese quake: good engineering has saved tens of thousands of lives. Just compare the event in Haiti, last year, to this event. And we can watch the well-engineered buildings swaying, not collapsing, in this cool video:
Most of the deaths in Japan have been from tsunami flooding, not collapsing things. A huge evolution from the Kobe quake only 15 years ago, in 1995. Other bloggers have observed that this quake – having been so huge and yet having such a limited death toll (not to minimize this in any way) – is proof that the worst "natural disasters" are also social disasters – failures of the social contract.
It is perhaps early to be triumphalist on behalf of engineers: they're still struggling with their abundance of nuclear power plants – and it's easy for me to imagine things could go horribly wrong, there. Certainly, if Korea were an earthquake-prone country (which it's not), I'd have much more ambivalent feelings about living 5 km from one of the largest nuclear facilities in the world.