The method for driving a plasma display panel effects control of the sub-fields in a manner that at least one sub-filed carries out, in its initializing period, an all-cell initializing operation on the discharge cells and the plurality of sub-fields other than the aforementioned sub-field selectively carry out an addressing operation in each discharge cell; at the same time, two or more predetermined sub-fields carry out an addressing operation only when at least one sub-field had an addressing operation after the all-cells initializing operation; and an unusual-charge erase period, where scan electrodes SC-SCn undergo application of voltage with a rectangular waveform, is provided after the initializing period of at least one sub-field of the predetermined sub-fields.