I've recently come on to learning the passive tense in Japanese. I'm struggling a bit with the role of the subject or topic with these sentences.
In English and say Latin as examples, the subject of a passive sentence is always the object on which the action is performed.
E.g.
The boy [subj.] was seen by the girl [ablative]
The ball [subj.] was thrown at the boy [indirect obj.] by the girl [ablative]
This is also a construction in Japanese with the ablative being mapped to ~に
男の子は女の子に見られた
However it seems like when there is both an indirect object or topic and a direct object it gets a bit vaguer
A translation for the ball sentence could be (if I've misused 蹴る here just imagine 私は友達に日記を読まれた as the same sort of construction）
男の子は女の子に球を蹴られた
It seems like the subject of the sentence has taken the direct object particle, and if we imagine the sentence in the absence of human actors we could say:
球 は／が 蹴られた
(or 日記 は／が 読まれた)
So despite the action being the same, the particle of the thing which is having the action performed on it can change. This is what's confusing me, is there a rule for how particles should be attributed here? I'm finding most guides online gloss over this aspect.
Would appreciate if anyone has anything that might help, thanks :))
by CoronaDelapida