Rhetoric analysis: demystifying Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s monetary experiment

Former Bank of Japan (hereafter BOJ) Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s pledge in 2013 to achieve the central bank’s inflation target in two years had a huge market impact. This article is the first analysis combining quantitative and qualitative measures to examine the rhetorical tools used in Kuroda’s monetary experiment. A quantitative analysis of 134 speeches by four governors from 1998 to 2022 showed Kuroda used assertive language with the ratio of high epistemic modality hitting 25.5% in 2013, 27.4% in 2014 and 29.0% in 2015, higher than during any year of his predecessors when it stayed below 20%. Kuroda also used metaphors like deflation is a disease and BOJ is a doctor to depict the BOJ as the main actor charged with ending deflation, in contrast to the passive role assigned to it by his predecessors. His rhetorical features later faded with the ratio of high modality falling below 20% from 2017. The findings show how under Kuroda, the BOJ explicitly used rhetoric to foreground its role in beating deflation. This article broadens the perspective of central bank communication by showing how rhetoric can be used for persuasion, but how its role is swayed by the shifting demands of monetary policy.