摘要:The classic zoning method and spatial smoothing of seismicity were used with seismicity, GPS, and late Quaternary fault data to develop time-invariant seismic potential models of shallow crustal earthquakes in the Japanese islands that were then tested against a 400-year Japanese historical earthquake catalog.The results demonstrated that the models so developed for seismic hazard estimation did not necessarily reproduce the observed seismicity.In some cases they were even worse than the Reference Model that assumes a uniform earthquake potential over all of the Japanese islands.A subsequent analysis of the original dataset once it had been divided into two subsets based on time indicated that the present-day spatial distribution of small earthquakes and surface horizontal strain are much affected by previous large earthquakes.Two sources of information were the most effective: regionalized seismicity of small earthquakes and the active fault data.Two models using each of them were not only successful, but also robust.A model combining the distributions of small and moderate-size earthquakes proposed by Frankel in 1995 was also effective for modeling the distributed sources, which are unrelated to the faults.In this study, we tested the spatial variation of the likelihood of large earthquakes with M ≥ 6.8. Key words Seismic hazard seismic potential model testing crustal earthquake.