Abstract Chapter 7 introduced the plate configuration in and around the Japanese islands, particularly with respect to the deep seismic structure and associated seismicity. This chapter overviews the shallow seismicity in Japan, with a particular focus on inland active faulting from the viewpoint of earthquake geology. This is followed by a consideration of the long-term earthquake forecasting and seismic hazard assessment research that has been accelerated since the 1995 Kobe earthquake emphasizing several of the more important current issues such as the presence of hidden faults, the effects of fault segmentation, sequential rupture and seismic cycles, as well as time dependency due to stress perturbation.