This study explored whether the learner ethnicity has any influence on the frequency and the choice of language learning strategy use by investigating learners of Japanese through the use of the SILL. The participants were 151 students of Japanese at an American University. The results of the mean SILL scores of each ethnicity revealed that the learners' ethnicities seem not to influence their frequency of strategy use. Regardless of the learner's different ethnicity, the frequency of strategy use was similar throughout the ethnic groups, and they all used social strategies most frequently and affective strategies least frequently. This result does not support previous findings regarding ESL learners. Yet, the results confirm the findings of Grainger's study (1997) investigating the strategy use for learners of Japanese. Thus, the tendencies found in this study may be one characteristic particular to Japanese language learner strategies. However, the ethnicities affect the choice of the strategy use based on the ranking of the 80 strategies of the SILL. The results of the different choices of the least used strategies among American learners and Asian learners suggest that they chose different strategies particularly for memorization, possibly because of the different previous language learning experiences. Also, the discrepancies between the most used strategies among the different ethnic learner groups indicate that in addition to the ethnicity variable the distance between the learners' mother tongues and the target language may be one influential factor in their strategy choices. (Contains 6 figures.)