The Japanese passive voice has been bothering me for quite a while. I mean, We
don't really use it in English, and I still have not come across many
situation (at least daily situations)Where the Japanese passive voice has been
used, besides in articles and essays.

I do get the general idea of how to use 受身形{うけみけい}, however, I'm still not
sure of _when_ to use it.

So my question is, when exactly do I use 受身形{うけみけい}？

For example:

> ① ジョンは先生に質問をした

> ② 先生はジョンに質問をされた

Wouldn't it be more natural to use the active voice instead of the passive
voice? This is what confuses me. When exactly do I use the passive voice.
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passive-voice
When to use 受身形 (passive voice) And when to use 能動形 (active voice)?
ジョンは先生に質問をした focuses on what John did, whereas 先生はジョンに質問をされた focuses on what
happened to the teacher. As you know, the word marked with は is the topic of
the sentence. These two sentences look equally natural to me, but they are not
necessarily interchangeable. Which to use depends on the theme of the
conversation.

In general, when "what was done" is more important than "who did it", people
tend to use passive voice in Japanese (probably more often than you do so in
English). In particular, when you are negatively affected by the action, the
passive voice conveys such nuance well (known as ["sufferer
passive"](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/1777/5010)).

  * 彼は僕を殴った。 He hit me.
  * (彼に)殴られた。 I was hit (by him).

When you report this incident to someone, 殴られた is the default choice because
you have been negatively affected by the punch. Saying the former would sound
too indifferent.

When you cannot (or don't want to) mention who does the action, the passive
voice is used both in English and Japanese:

  * この塔は200年前に建てられました。  
This tower was built 200 years ago.

In this case, saying "They/Someone built this tower 200 years ago" is less
natural even in casual English, isn't it?

The Japanese language tend to avoid taking inanimate things as subjects (see
[this](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/32449/5010)). You can say "The
news surprised me" (active) in English, but in Japanese, そのニュースは私を驚かせました is
very literary and almost never happens in speech. A better way of putting it
is そのニュースに私は驚かされました using the passive voice, which translates to "I was
surprised at the news." (passive). But this is still a bit unnatural, and
people usually say そのニュースに私は驚きました instead, using an intransitive verb 驚く that
means "to be surprised". It's complicated, but note that in some cases only
English speakers use passive voice. To take another example, "I'm worried"
(passive) is usually "心配している" (active) in Japanese.

Lastly, this is a very big topic and it's hard to generalize when to use the
passive voice. There is [an
article](http://www.f.chiba-u.jp/about/plc07/plc07-09.pdf) discussing the
difference in the usage of passive voice between English and Japanese, but
reading this may not help you understand the real usage much. Probably you
need to read many real and long text to get used to the Japanese passive
voice.
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answer
We use passive voice in order to keep consistency of sentences.

When you describe a fact that ジョンは先生に質問した / 先生はジョンに質問された in context of what 先生
did, it's more efficient to put 先生 on the position of the subject of the
sentence because you can inherit it from the previous context and omit it.
e.g. 先生は、朝起きて学校へ行ったら、ジョンに質問された.

In addition, you can fix the perspective too. One of the major mistakes by
learners in Japanese composition is translating "the boss told me" into
上司は話した, which indicates the act of speaking is done to the direction that goes
away from the center (or origin) of your perspective. (Adding 私に doesn't cure
the twist of perspective.) In this regard, passive voice can avoid that
problem. i.e （私は）言われた

Regulation or tendency to perspective or animacy, which naruto refers to, is
required for the sake of convention of frequent omission of the subject. You
can understand a sentence with the subject omitted when it's fixed in advance.
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answer