Japanese is a relatively ordinary language in terms of its phonology, lexicon and syntax. Its reputation as a special or difficult language derives largely from social contextual factors (particularly honorific and respect forms necessary in conversation between Japanese) and from the complexity of the writing system. However, a major reason for interest is that it is an important but apparently isolated language with no established or generally accepted relationship to other languages or language-families. It is for this reason that an examination of it from a new perspective, that of the motor theory of language evolution and function, can be stimulating and possibly illuminating. The motor theory, as described in papers for previous meetings of the LOS, proposes as a universal principle that the structures of language (phonological, lexical and syntactic) were derived from and modelled on the pre-existing complex neural systems which had evolved for motor control, the control of bodily activity. Motor control at the neural level requires pre-set elementary units of action which can be integrated into more extended patterns of action - neural motor programs. These in turn have to be linked to and integrated with one another by 'syntactic' neural processes and structures. On this theory, given that speech is also essentially a motor activity, language made use of the elementary pre-set units of motor action to produce the equivalent phonological units (phonemic categories); the neural programs for individual words were constructed from the elementary units in the same way as motor programs for bodily action are formed from them (in both cases a neural program is formed in direct relation to the perceived structure of the external world); the syntactic processes and structures of language proper were modelled on the 'syntactic' rules of motor control. The paper considers how far the phenomena of the Japanese language are compatible with and explainable in terms of the motor theory.