When the shaking started at 5:46 a.m., Yasuhisa Itakura… was sitting at his desk. His office swayed, but… “I thought to myself, this earthquake is not that big.” It was, in fact, catastrophic. The Great Hanshin earthquake of January 17, 1995, killed more than 6,000 people in and around the industrial port city. Mr. Itakura had been cushioned from the violence of the earthquake because his three-story office building was sitting on an experimental foundation made from rubber — an early version of an engineering technique called base isolation. But with notable exceptions, including Apple’s new headquarters in Silicon Valley, the innovations have been used only sparingly in the United States. Seismic safety advocates describe this as a missed opportunity to save billions of dollars in reconstruction costs after the inevitable Big One strikes. …One company has developed inflatable airbags that deploy underneath a wooden home when a large earthquake is detected.