Yes, we could do that. The system in Japan is designed to withstand powerful earthquakes and typhoons and much of it is above ground. They don't use wooden power poles there. I guess they're steel reinforced concrete poles, from what I can tell. The average US electrical customer sees far more minutes of blackout than your average European or Japanese customer. (From a survey I read in the news a couple years ago--sorry, no reference for it).

Or even here in the US, from what I've read, the quality of electrical components in certain regions of the country, like the Southwest, are higher than in others. E.g. the kind of heat that causes transformers to blow up and transmission lines to melt down due to high demand in a New York heat wave don't bother the equipment in, say, Phoenix.

Of course, the real crux is money. Are we, as electrical customers, willing to pay more every single month for all this extra robustness? The popularity of discount big box stores like Walmart leads me to say, "No, I want cheap power". Plus, with privatization and the breaking up of power generation and distribution across separate companies makes the cost of such upgrades that much harder to bear by the smaller companies that actually own the equipment.