Passive れる/られる when there's no direct English equivalent — 'meiwaku no ukemi'

Question

I get 'the cake was eaten' = ケーキが食べられた, but then I saw 「雨に降られて、困った」and there's no passive in the English translation at all ('I was troubled because it rained on me'). What's going on grammatically?

Accepted Answer

That's the famous 'suffering passive' (迷惑の受身) — Japanese can passivize even intransitive verbs like 降る to show the speaker was negatively affected by the event, even though there's no direct object being acted upon. 雨に降られた literally structures as 'I was rained on' but really means 'the rain fell and it was inconvenient for me.' English just doesn't have this construction, so it always gets translated as a causal clause instead of a literal passive. Very common with 泣く (子供に泣かれた = a child cried [on] me, annoyingly), 死ぬ, 来る when uninvited, etc.