In previous studies, the residual activation account has been proposed in order to investigate the structural priming (SP) effect in head-initial languages (e.g., English). The present study investigated the possibility of applying the same model in Japanese, a headfinal language, using a sentence completion task to examine the SP effect in the production of passives. SP effects were found in both Experiment 1 which used a canonical word order primes and Experiment 2 which employed a scrambled word order primes, when verbs were generated by participants. These results indicated that the residual activation account of SP could be applied to Japanese. Moreover, these findings suggested a combined SP process in our study, in which the verb prediction during sentence comprehension interacted with the activation of lexical-syntactic nodes (combinatorial nodes) which representing certain syntactic rules in production. Additionally, various implications of sentence production mechanism in Japanese were discussed, from the perspective of the predictive mechanism proposed in the field of sentence processing.