Japanese speakers prefer non-agentive expressions when describing events that equally allow agentive (e.g., ‘I dropped the keys’) and non-agentive (e.g., ‘The keys dropped’) descriptions (Choi, 2009; Teramura, 1976). However, they are more likely to use agentive expressions when describing intentional events (Fausey, Long, & Boroditsky, 2009). This study examined how native Japanese speakers comprehend and construe the agents of unintentional and intentional events in sentences with unspecified agents of blamable acts. The results support that listeners flexibly adopt an agent’s or observer’s perspective given explicit grammatical pronouns (“I” or “the other”) in Japanese, and they consider another person to be the agent of negative events.