Since spatial join processing consumes much time, several algorithms have been proposed to improve spatial join performance. The M-way R-tree join (MRJ) is a join algorithm which synchronously traverses M R-trees in the M-way spatial join. In this paper, we introduce indirect predicates which do not directly come from the multi-way join conditions but are indirectly derived from them. By applying the concept of indirect predicates to MRJ, we improve the performance of MRJ. We call such a multi-way R-tree join algorithm using indirect predicates indirect predicate filtering (IPF). Through experiments using synthetic data and real data, we show that IPF significantly