Don,

I think Chris sensed what I meant. The plate boundary is a fault by default, so to speak. But as you get farther away, there could be no fault, as in his India example. That place has to suffer an EQ in order to have a fault.

In our case experts immediately said "gee, we did not know a fault was there", in effect automatically assuming that there had been a fault there. It might seem a mite trite, but I was also thinking of all those worried people buying an exorbitantly priced set of fault maps afterwards.

I had a look at those maps and had to laugh, because it was hard to find any place that was not very close to an ominous red line. Even if you found a big white spot, and moved there, it might turn out that there was an unknown fault. And even if there was no unknown fault, an EQ could still occur and create a new fault. Aside from emigration, Japanese people have to rely on trips to the local shrine.

Ara