It would not come as a surprise to the fields of marketing and consumer research that language—specifically rhetoric—is crucial to effective advertising. But just how might linguistics look at the same figures of speech that fascinate the world of commerce? A meeting of the minds between business and marketing on the one hand and linguistics on the other is taking place through their mutual interest in semiotics and classical rhetoric. This recent work relies on rhetoric’s elaborate and time-honored taxonomy for talking about how language is used for effect. Although there is considerable research available on the rhetoric of western advertising, research to date has yet to focus attention on the advertising of a non-western tradition such as Japan. The questions I wish to address here are: What are the common rhetorical devices of Japanese advertising? And how do they compare with their western counterparts? The umbrella of rhetoric has a broad scope which may have to be expanded even further to accommodate tropes and schemes that may not be present in western texts.