Research activities in Japan relevant to particle beam inertial fusion are briefly reviewed. These activities can be ascended to the 1980s.During the past three decades, significant progress in particle beam fusion, pulsed power systems, accelerator schemes for intense beams, targetphysics, and high-energy-density physics research has been made by a number of research groups at universities and accelerator facilities inJapan. High-flux ions have been extracted from laser ablation plasmas. Controllability of the ion velocity distribution in the plasma by an axialmagnetic and/or electric field has realized a stable high-flux low-emittance beam injector. Beam dynamics have been studied both theoreticallyand experimentally. The efforts have been concentrated on the beam behavior during the final compression stage of intense beam accelerators. Anovel accelerator scheme based on a repetitive induction modulator has been proposed as a cost-effective particle-beam driver scheme. Beamplasmainteraction and pulse-powered plasma experiments have been investigated as relevant studies of particle beam inertial fusion. Anirradiation method to mitigate the instability in imploding target has been proposed using oscillating heavy-ion beams. The new irradiationmethod has reopened the exploration of direct drive scheme of particle beam fusion.