The problem of the acquisition of transitive-intransitive verb pairs is still in controversy in spite of many teachers' and researchers' interests. The first half of this paper reviews the theoretical background of Japanese transitive-transitive verb pairs and summarizes their morphological, syntactic, and semantic frameworks. The second half reviews the acquisition studies of Japanese transitive-intransitive verb pairs and argues what kind of research is needed now. The findings are as follows : 1) It is not clear what the researchers intend by the term "transitive-intransitive verb pairs". 2) There are few studies that focus on the lexical features of verbs. 3) More introspective methods are needed in the studies. 4) There are few studies that have production data of learners. Given these findings, I aim to promote the acquisition studies of Japanese transitive-intransitive verb pairs that can contribute to language pedagogy.