In the spoken Japanese language, we often employ unfinished sentences which end with subordinate conjunctions such as kara, noni and ke(re)do. These sentenses are felt to be complete sentences in spite of their structural incompleteness and the conjunctions employed function like sentence-final particles.

This paper deals with sentences ending with kara. Kara is generally said to be a conjunction which indicates reason. But strangely enough, its sentence final use adds to the sentence emphatic implication to express the speaker's strong will or volition, which is not predictable from its original meaning.

It will be argued why such sentence-final usage is possible with Kara. It will be shown that the conjunction kara indicates not only "reason" but also "background" and that the sentence-final usage is a natural result of the omission of the main clause in the "background" usage.