AbstractThe accumulation process of high‐Z impurity in toroidal rotating tokamak plasma is investigated. A new inward pinch of high‐Z impurity due to the ionization/recombination processes is derived using an analytic model. This inward pinch is driven by the large deviation of a drift orbit from a magnetic surface and the resultant variation of the charge state along the drift orbit. The pinch velocity increases with increasing toroidal rotation speed in both the co‐direction and the ctr‐direction. The inward pinch expected by the analytic model is really observed in the numerical simulation using the IMPGYRO code (© 2010 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)