This paper proposes a method to resolve extrasentential references or Japanese zero pronouns suitable for application in generally applicable machine translation systems. This method focuses on semantic and pragmatic constraints such as semantic constraints on the cases, modal expressions, verbal semantic attributes and conjunctions to determine extrasentential antecedents of Japanese zero pronouns. This method is highly effective because the volume of knowledge that must be prepared beforehand is reasonable and its precision of resolution is good. This method was implemented in the Japanese-to-English machine translation system, ALT-J/E. To evaluate the performance of our method, we conducted a window test for 5 types of zero pronouns with extrasentential antecedents (193 instances) in a sentence set for the evaluation of the performance of Japanese to English machine translation systems (3718 sentences). According to the evaluation, extrasentential antecedents could be resolved correctly for all of the zero pronouns examined. By examining the accuracy for various conditions, we found that the verbal semantic attributes were comparatively as effective as modal expressions. By examining the accuracy for rule complexity, we found that this method can achieve high accuracy using relatively simple rules. Furthermore, by testing on an unknown text for all types of zero pronouns with extrasentential antecedents (371 instances) in the sentence set, we found that 87.6% of zero pronouns could be correctly resolved.