(Disclaimer: I’m not a native speaker nor fluent in Japanese. So please take everything said here with a grain of salt. Also, this is my first time creating a post on Lemmy, so I hope I don’t make any mistakes.)

I made a post about this topic on Reddit some time ago. I think it’s interesting enough to post about it here as well to get the community going.

The Wikipedia article on 無生物主語構文（むせいぶつしゅごこうぶん）describes a difference between Japanese and English (and probably many other languages’) sentence structures.

While in English it is okay to have an inanimate subject in a sentence with a transitive verb, a direct translation into Japanese would sound unnatural.

Here is an example: The English sentence “This medicine will make you feel better.” can be naturally translated as 「この薬を飲めば、気分が良くなりますよ。」

The inanimate subject in the English sentence (“this medicine”) becomes an object in the Japanese sentence, and the “you”, which is an object in the English sentence can be thought of as the subject in the Japanese sentence (which is not explicitly mentioned in this case).

Unfortunately, I don’t have an easy to follow rule on how to translate such sentences into Japanese, but many examples are translated with simple conditional phrases or something like ～のため or ～のせいで.

Note that all of this only applies to 他動詞. 自動詞 on the other hand can take inanimate subjects without the problem of sounding unnatural.

A google search will yield many more examples.

グーグルで検索してみれば、例文がたかさん見つかれます。