Guidelines on using the passive form

[mikuji]

Text books and grammar text will give you how to form the passive. Indeed we had a couple of intermediate lessons that told us about forming passive class I and II verb.

I would like to know more about when this form is used.

In English, for example, when we write technical reports we normally use the passive to give the text an impersonal flavour (i.e. more factual flavour). Is it the same in Japanese? Are there some expressions using the passive we cannot do without? Are there some cases where in English we would use the passive and in Japanese we would definitely not?

I appreciate this is a big area of Japanese language and I am not suggesting we dive into suffering passives etc.. but what I would like an introduction to the passive form in its most common uses, maybe just some fixed expressions.

Thanks

mikuji