Regarding omitted subjects: “The Myth of the Subjectless sentence.” An excerpt from “Making Sense of Japanese,” by Jay Rubin.

Hello fellow Japanese learners.

I’m sure many of you saw the [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/y3i8h5/omitted_subjects_a_case_study_for_how_knowing/) yesterday regarding the omission of subjects in Japanese sentences. That post by /u/ochiterukujira reminded me of an excerpt I had read from a book at my local library that I thought did a good job of parsing through that exact idea, and after a quick stop I was able to find the original book and Author’s name.

The author, Jay Rubin, as it turns out, is a professional translator who has a PhD in Japanese literature and even held a job at Harvard university for a time where he was a research professor in Japanese humanities. I wasn’t exactly looking for someone with accolades but learning all this did make me a bit more confident in posting his work here (笑).

But I digress, after checking online I was happy to find that google actually offers a preview of the book [here](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Making_Sense_of_Japanese/HSkOEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0) (via google.com/books) that includes the entire section on the subjectless sentence which is probably only about a 5-10 minute read. I recommend going and browsing the full preview, but if you are having trouble finding the part I mentioned I’ll include direct image links to the pages here for all who have an interest in reading it: [1](https://books.google.com/books/publisher/content?id=HSkOEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT20&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&bul=1&sig=ACfU3U1JHADHEvZCNnb27ET58_yymt90Tw&w=1280), [2](https://books.google.com/books/publisher/content?id=HSkOEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT21&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&bul=1&sig=ACfU3U2IINkluOjmnIYyHj6PUkw7H7jbig&w=1280), [3](https://books.google.com/books/publisher/content?id=HSkOEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT22&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&bul=1&sig=ACfU3U3g2KVUtBqCem3EFU4RMYG2s_olLQ&w=1280), [4](https://books.google.com/books/publisher/content?id=HSkOEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT23&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&bul=1&sig=ACfU3U2MqWkcRSIu4YNAgwauH12PB0KzdQ&w=1280), [5](https://books.google.com/books/publisher/content?id=HSkOEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT24&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&bul=1&sig=ACfU3U3x4eWUcvJ0c_mwg2eIpLcowRQaxw&w=1280), & [6](https://books.google.com/books/publisher/content?id=HSkOEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT25&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&bul=1&sig=ACfU3U1-EWo6EHTJcNJ9If55HR3e1Z0JMg&w=1280) (Via books.google.com, although they’re actually just pulled from the same webpage I linked before).

That’s all from me, 読んでくれてありがとうね (The irony that this subjectless sentence doesn’t specify whether I was referring to this post or the book I linked isn’t lost on me, although I’m guessing most of you picked up that I meant the post 😉 )

P.S. As an FYI, the Author does have a bit of humor in his writing style and adds a lot of voice to his work, so it doesn’t read exactly like a textbook which I know some people will like and others not.