I can truly understand your wife's feeling about earthquakes especially if she experienced one in a different country.

My wife is a Kobe earthquake survivor. Her house was demolished in the earthquake, she saw the aftermath, watched neighbors get pulled from demolished buildings. Her reaction to earthquakes are different than mine.

When we were living in Taiwan, we experienced many many many small earthquakes, I thought it was a cool experience but my wife reaction was immediate to try to mitiage the possible dangers. IE - immediately stop and get off elevators, she looks above to see if anything can/may fall. Moves to the safest area in a building etc.

At PT Travel mentioned, my wife says Japan has really improved their earthquake preparation and building code so it is one of the places she truly feels it is the safest if there was an earthquake.