Japanese railway tunnels, including urban rail transit tunnels, have been developing for more than 100 years, and have suffered spalling, cracking, deterioration, water leakage, etc. In this paper, the railway tunnel construction conditions, performance requirements, disease types and causes in Japan are investigated, and it is concluded that about 40% of the tunnel diseases in Japan are related to the design and construction, 27% to the operating environment, 23% to the materials used, and 10% to the external force variation. And then, the developing and application status of maintenance management system(including inspection, disease diagnosis, countermeasures and record), automatic inspection technology and intelligent technology are presented, and the existing problems, i.e. nonuniform operation maintenance standards for similar tunnel under same conditions, automatic inspection technology only as auxiliary inspection means for some tunnels due to high cost and substandard level, impracticable resource sharing due to confidential information, lack of special technical personnel, and aging of the talents, are pointed out. These problems obstruct the developing of operation maintenance technology and affect the cost and quality. Based on developing of tunnel operation maintance technologies, the authors propose that aiming at reducing the life cycle cost of tunnel facilities and extending the service life, the predictive maintenance system based on the structural performance and cost should be established, the integrated operation maintenance technology, rapid repair and reinforcement technology and intelligent operation maintenance management system should be developed, and thus through multidisciplinary integration, a systematic operation maintenance management system of railway tunnel is established.