A v interesting account NJ. Perh I should have given more detail of our first-hand experience of actually being bang over the epicentre of the Great Kobe Earthquake:
http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/ChatterBank/Question813837.html
Not the same horrendous death toll as the tsunamis that you had a brush with (six and a half thousand dead, hundreds of thousand injured or homeless for many months).
And jno, some good points, but re "if only they'd come up with a single word that means 'he or she'". They have, if by 'they' you mean any sane, literate and aware speaker of English who hasnt been freaked out by pedantic piffle. That word is 'they' with plural agreement, except that my anti-prescriptivism doesn't extend to plurals like "Someone's going to fall down those stairs and break their necks"! I don't even like "Someone's going to fall down those stairs and hurt themselves". I am encouraged to see the use of "hurt themself" etc. establishing itself.
I too am disgruntled about "soonarmie". The Japanese term tsunami is as inaccurate as 'tidal wave' actually, since it means 'harbour wave', tho you can see why that usage evolved. Why did we have to adopot its technical use from Japanese seismologists? Quite apart from its not-much-less-inappropriate etymology, there seem to be a ridiculous number of articulatorily challenged people who can't pronounce it, including newsreaders and even seismologists. It could have been called a 'seismic wave' by analogy with 'tidal wave'.