The slightly disheveled appearance of the Japanese cabinet ministers who posed for an official photo last week — wrinkled trousers here, a triangle of exposed dress shirt there — was the sort of thing that some observers might overlook.
But officials working for Japan’s new prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, couldn’t let it go. So a few days after releasing the actual photo on social media, they published a tidied-up version on his website.
When Mr. Ishiba’s office disclosed the photo manipulation on Monday, a spokesman added that it was standard procedure in Japan to make “slight” edits on such images. That raised the question of what other possible fashion breaches had been committed, and covered up, under previous leaders.
The episode highlighted the generally high standard of the dress code in Japan, a country where politicians wear tailcoats for formal events, cabbies have traditionally driven with white gloves, and salarymen largely stick with suits and ties even as some of their counterparts in other rich countries embrace jeans and open collars.
It’s also one of many times in which public figures around the world have allowed photos or videos of themselves to be altered.
In Pakistan, a former prime minister, Imran Khan, campaigned for a February general election through speeches released by his party that had used artificial intelligence to replicate his voice, for example.
In Britain, Catherine, Princess of Wales, apologized in March for sharing a manipulated photo of her family that was later recalled by several news agencies. She said she had edited it herself.
And in the United States, Representative Mike Collins, Republican of Georgia, was criticized last week after he posted an artificially slimmed-down portrait of Senator JD Vance, Donald J. Trump’s running mate in the November presidential election.
The Japanese government’s decision to alter a photo of Mr. Ishiba’s cabinet last week appears to have backfired to some degree because it prompted fresh news coverage and discussion of the ministers’ sartorial faux pax.
The cabinet convened for the photo on Oct. 1, days after the power brokers of the country’s governing Liberal Democratic Party selected Mr. Ishiba as the country’s new leader. His office released an altered version of the photograph later in the week, after some social media users criticized it as sloppy.
“The government has made slight alterations not only in the specific photo but also in past photos, as those will be kept as mementos” by the people who appeared in them, Yoshimasa Hayashi, the chief cabinet secretary, told reporters on Monday.
That provided instant fodder for Mr. Ishiba’s critics. An opposition lawmaker, Ichiro Ozawa, said he saw the alteration as symptomatic of the L.D.P.’s general lack of transparency.
“They cover things up and don’t show the truth to the people,” he said on social media. “Do you still tolerate their fake politics?”
Others, like Kumiko Suzuka, a former secretary for several Japanese lawmakers, were more accepting. In a post on her blog that detailed the various problems that had caused garments to fall awkwardly on some ministers, including Mr. Ishiba, she offered a possible explanation for why they may not have looked their sharpest. Many of them, she wrote, were previously minor L.D.P. figures who probably had not worn that level of formal attire in years.
But Ms. Suzuka said in a phone interview on Tuesday that she didn’t mind that the government had manipulated an image plagued by too-baggy trousers and ill-fitting tailcoats.
“I think alterations should be applied in order to keep the impression of cleanliness as it’s presented overseas as representative of Japanese people,” Ms. Suzuka said. She added that such touches can helpfully remove wrinkles or recolor gray hairs.
Sanae Takaichi, an L.D.P. politician who competed for the recent prime ministerial nomination, once described on her blog what it feels like to pose for such a picture.
In 2006, when Shinzo Abe, the new prime minister at the time, invited her to join his cabinet, she wrote that she only had about 15 minutes to change before a ceremony at the Imperial Palace and a photo shoot.
“I remember how hurried things were that day,” she wrote in the 2006 post. “But I was determined not to forget my original responsibilities, and to calmly carry out my duties.”
The post Japan Says It Manipulated a Photo of (Slightly) Unkempt Cabinet Ministers appeared first on New York Times.
