This research aims to examine the meaning and function of the past tense in Hungarian from a typological perspective and compare it with Japanese. Tense is a grammatical category that identifies the relationship between the speech time and the event time. Interestingly, some languages treat verb tenses as a grammatical category while others express time only through lexical means such as time adverbs. In the case of Hungarian, the language being studied in this paper, it expresses time through a grammatical category similar to English and Japanese, with a contrastive system of ‘past’ and ‘non-past’. The past tense expression in Hungarian is combined with the morpheme ‘-t/tt’, which can represent not only actual past events but also various situations. Firstly, it can express past events or reminiscences, and it can also be used for actions in the future that have not yet occurred. In such cases, it can convey sentiment such as speaker’s certainty or determination. Additionally, the past tense can be used in subordinate clauses to indicate that the action preceded the one stated in the main clause. These meanings and functions can be considered common to Japanese as well. However, while Japanese ‘-た(ta)’ can also be used for urgent commands or discoveries, in Hungarian, these situations are expressed differently rather than using the past tense, which can be seen as a point of difference between Hungarian and Japanese.