The purpose of this paper is to review research related to motorcycling conducted in postwar Japan, a country that was somewhat closed both linguistically and regionally. After World War II, many aeronautical engineers worldwide lost their jobs and moved on to other fields of study, especially in Japan, where aeronautical engineer jobs, including research, were banned and many aeronautical engineers shifted their research focus on transportation machinery, especially automotive engineering. Against this background, Japanese two-wheeled vehicles-related research has developed in its own unique way, while retaining a strong influence from aeronautical engineering. Because of the wide base of research on motorcycle kinematics, we first presented the literature for each study in the same line of research together. They are summarized in the following four areas： (1) Experimental studies dealing with motorcycle motion and problem extraction. (2) Research dealing with theoretical aspects such as the construction of equations of motion to solve experimental problems and to look at motion from the aspect of characteristics estimation. (3) Research on various human-related issues, such as human control behavior modeling, vibration characteristics of the human body, HMI, and so on. (4) Research on motorcycles as control objects and research focused on control systems. Although there are many studies that straddle these two categories, they were generally grouped into one or the other.