A number of scholars have noted that contact with English has changed the Japanese language in a process of Englishization. While the most profound effects of Englishization may be seen in the influx of new lexemes, deeper structural changes to Japanese syntactic structures and phonology have not been observed with great regularity. A review of previous research on Englishization and Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988) model of language change suggest that syntactic effects of Englishization in Japanese are to be expected. The Japanese ukemi ‘passive’ voice construction has been hypothesized to have been Englishized and close attention is given to those claims. In particular, the hypothesis that Englishization would produce a preference for direct passives over indirect (or adversative) passives is considered. This article examines a corpus of news media texts that can be divided into two sub-corpora: those written in Japanese and those translated from English into Japanese. While the indirect passive does not appear often in either sub-corpus, it appears more frequently in texts written in Japanese. The indirect passives in the sub-corpus of translated Japanese are also limited by the types of verbs that are passivized. The sociolinguistic nature of English in Japan, where the language is taught to nearly every student in the country, suggests that Englishization effects on the passive construction produce contact-induced variation that could be the earliest signs of change in progress.