Like serious minded newspapers around the world, the Schweriner Volkszeitung of northern Germany gave a good deal of coverage to the Group of Eight Summit in Heiligendamm. Apart from news reports on the deliberations of the heads of government, and weighty analysis of the issues at stake, the paper ran brief profiles of the leaders accompanied by a mugshot of each. There was George, Tony, Angela, Vlad, Sarko, Prodi, the EU bloke (Barroso) the Canadian prime minister (I know it, don't tell me . . . Harper! Stephen Harper) and - making his debut at the G8 ball - Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe.
Sure enough, the face in the photograph was that of a middle aged Japanese-speaking Asian man with black hair, brown eyes, and a hesitant smile. He looked like a Japanese prime minister. He sounded like a Japanese prime minister. If one were to go as far as to remove pieces of his flesh and broil them in teppanyaki sauce, he would probably taste like a Japanese prime minister, too. But unfortunately, he was not Shinzo Abe.
He was Norihiko Akagi, recently appointed Japan's new agriculture minister, after the suicide of Toshikatsu Matsuoka who hanged himself a fortnight ago. An embarrassing balls-up by the picture desk of the Schweriner VZ - but does it also suggest something about Mr Abe and his leadership of the world's second largest economy?
Whatever Japanese diplomats managed to convince themselves about their reach and influence in the world, the G8 summit - in the old days at least - was usually the occasion where the reality was exposed. In the team photograph, the Japanese prime minister, whoever he happened to be at the time, was inevitably the little guy whose name you couldn't remember, standing rather uncomfortably at the edge of the edge of the group, next to an inequally unmemorable, but much taller, Canadian.
Remember Tomiichi Murayama at Halifax, Nova Scotia (picture above)? Nope, no one else does either.
This trend was temporarily bucked in the 1980s by Yasuhiro Nakasone, who cut a dash with his relative loftiness and his Imperial Navy officer's bearing. See him below, right in the middle with Ronald Reagan (and how young Margaret looks!)
But the first Japanese prime minister truly to imprint his image on the outside world was Junichiro Koizumi. He had a genuinely interesting, frequently eccentric personality; he had clear ideas and goals of his own which he was ramming through at home (in the end, of course, his foreign policy achievements are a lot less clear); and he was visually striking, with his height, his nice grey suits and his famous "mane".
Even the anti-globalisation protesters put him at the centre of their group:
But Abe ... from the admittedly supeficial, myopic and under-informed foreign perspective Abe just doesn't have qualities, does he? After nine months what hooks has he put into international consciousness? What is there to say about him? That he hasn't gone to Yasukuni and upset the Chinese? That he doesn't after all think that Japanese cruelty towards the comfort women has been exaggerated? That he wants a "beautiful Japan"?
Abe may or may not have a second chance, when Japan hosts the G8 in Hokkaido next year. That all depends on the outocome of the Upper House elections in July (my current guess is that he'll scrape through, winged and weakened). But in our heart of hearts, we know, don't we? Shinzo Abe (pictured right) just hasn't got it in him to be a great, or even a good, Japanese leader. The hacks at Schweriner Volkzeitung may have been a little sloppy, but there are good reasons why they got the Japanese prime minister wrong, rather than one of the others. And they simply wouldn't have made the same mistake with Koizumi or Nakasone (or even with the Canadian).
And it wasn't just them. When the anti-globalisation protesters turned out with their papier mache masks this year, they were behind the times. Either for lack of a good model, or ignorance, or because they just couldn't be bothered, they did not have an effigy of Shinzo Abe. Instead they reused the one from last year - of Junichiro Koizumi.