EQF,

99% politics? Japan has an impressive effort in both earthquake science and the rest of the geophysical topics, like solar physics, material science, and geology.

In many ways (GPS, borehole seismometers, fault mapping), they are doing a more thorough job than we are in the US. However, they have few results that would be give hope for your approaches. Are you familiar with their results?

As Don says, they as well as the Chinese are backing off their initially optimistic goals in prediction research.

John