Trajectories of the maximum horizontal tectonic stress &sgr;Hmax have been compiled for five regions of plate convergence, i.e., the Alaska-Aleutian, central Europe, Hellenic-Aegean, and southwest and northeast Japan. For southwest and northeast Japan, stress trajectories have been considered for both the present and Miocene times. The results indicate that in most cases a systematic stress gradient exists in the crust of the overlying plate; the stress is, from the plate boundary landward, compressional, shear, and tensional even in the region where active back arc speading is not taking place. In some regions, &sgr;Hmax maintains its direction subparallel with that of convergence as it changes from &sgr;1 to &sgr;2 (&sgr;1>&sgr;2>&sgr;3) in the back arc, whereas in other regions, &sgr;Hmax direction is changed to become parallel to the arc. Such a change appears to require some mechanisms in addition to simple landward stress attenuation. Some discussion is given on such mechanisms. None of the models proposed so far, however, seems to explain the observed extensional tectonics in back arc regions adequately.