Subject shift

The day before yesterday I talked about how Japanese omit the subject of a sentence. This reminds me of something.
Read this phrase.
"Looking down from the plane, the islands were like ants."
Is there anything wrong? For most Japanese people this would sound pretty natural.
But a grammar-strict British would correct this to
"Looked down from the plane, the islands were like ants."
In a sentence of participial construction (分詞構文), the subjects are considered to be the same. Who is looking down in the former sentence? "The viewer" is. But the latter half of the same sentence, the subject is "islands". Not the same. So it's wrong.
But if you translate this into Japanese,
飛行機から見ると、島々は蟻のようだった。Sounds very natural.
On the contrary, the second sentence which is considered grammatically correct, can be literally translated as
飛行機から見られると、島々は蟻のようだった。This sounds funny.
In Japanese, untold shift of subjects sounds more natural than persistence of a subject. That explains why 川端康成 didn't tell who came out of the long tunnel.
By the way, I once asked an American about how he felt when he read the first sentence. He said, "Is there anything wrong?" So it may not be wrong for most Americans. But this sentence was on an entrance examination as "where is a mistake?" question actually. Nitpicking English exams in Japan are really crazy.
The picture was taken in Zurich, Switzerland last year.