This discussion considers the process of subject raising, which takes the constituent subject out of the complement clause and makes it a constituent of the matrix clause and the occurrence of this process in Japanese and in other subject-object-verb (SOV) languages. The first part of the paper demonstrates why subject raising is not a common syntactic device in SOV languages and why it is difficult to prove that the transformation exists in these languages. The author suggests that there is, however, one sentence pattern in Japanese where subject raising is involved; the remainder of the paper is devoted to presenting evidence to prove the existence of this phenomenon. (VM)