This study aims to facilitate further understandings of the research trends and develop recommendations to advance the field of sport tourism in Japan. We systematically examined 47 selected articles from six databases published from 1992 to 2019. Considering the environment-strategy-performance (ESP) relationship based on Chang and Katrichis'study (2016), we also categorized articles into three conceptual groups from a tourism management perspective. Our findings revealed that the current majority of sport tourism research in Japan focuses on the psychological aspects of tourists such as sport and event tourists' psychological characteristics and their behavioral patterns. Most of selected articles were categorized in an environment class according to the ESP relationship and did not indicate a strong association with a strategy or performance class. Future examination on sport tourism studies in Japan should explore the extant studies published in peer-reviewed journals with more discipline-related keywords with a specific underpinning theoretical basis.
