Japan Passport Photo Size & Requirements

Japan's Mynaportal online passport-application system requires its own digital photo crop: 600×730px, JPEG, under 600KB. That's a genuinely different aspect ratio from the standard 35×45mm print photo (0.822 vs. 0.778) — not the same photo simply resized. This tool crops to the standard 35×45mm size used for in-person and postal applications. If you're applying through Mynaportal, you'll need a separate crop at that system's own ratio.

Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) specification calls for a plain, light-coloured background with no shadows — white in practice. Light blue is sometimes claimed online, but doesn't appear in the official specification, so this tool defaults to white.

This is the single most expensive mistake available on a Japanese passport application, so it is worth the arithmetic. The counter and postal photo is 35 × 45mm, a ratio of 0.778. The Mynaportal online application wants 600 × 730 pixels, a ratio of 0.822. Those are different shapes.

If you take a correctly cropped 35 × 45mm photo and force it into a 600 × 730 box, one of two things happens. Either the image gets stretched horizontally by about six per cent, which widens your face in a way that is subtle on screen and obvious to facial-recognition software, or it gets cropped at the top and bottom, which pushes the head height outside the permitted range. Neither is recoverable after submission.

The right approach is to treat them as two separate crops of the same original photograph. Shoot once, then frame twice — once at 35 × 45mm if you need a print, and once at the Mynaportal ratio if you are applying online. The cropper on this page is set to the 35 × 45mm print and counter spec, which is what most people need; if you are going through Mynaportal, use that system’s own guidance for the second crop rather than converting the file you downloaded here.

Japan publishes the head height as a single target with a tolerance rather than a range: 34mm from chin to crown, give or take 2mm. Working out to 32 to 36mm, that is the same band South Korea, the UAE and Pakistan use at the same physical size, so a photo cropped correctly for one of those will usually be close enough for the other.

Two millimetres is a narrow margin on a photo that is only 45mm tall — four and a half per cent of the total height — which is why eyeballing the crop rarely works and why the guide lines above are drawn to the band rather than to a single line. Fit your head between them and you are inside the tolerance by construction.

Japan is unusually well served for this. The 証明写真機 booths outside stations and in shopping centres produce a correctly sized sheet in a couple of minutes, and most of them now carry a passport preset that handles the framing for you. If one is on your way, it is hard to beat for convenience.

Where a booth is less good is when you want a particular photo of yourself rather than whatever the booth catches on the third attempt. The lighting is flat and frontal, you get a handful of tries, and there is no undo. Taking the photo yourself against a wall in good light, cropping it here, and then printing it gives you control over the result — and if the first attempt is unflattering you simply take another.

For the printing step, the multi-copy machines in convenience stores will print a file from a phone or a memory card onto photo paper, which is the usual route if you do not have a photo printer at home. Use the print-sheet option under the download button to lay several copies onto one 4 × 6 inch or A4 page first, so you get a strip to cut rather than a single tiny photo on a large sheet.

One last thing on the background. A great many Japanese studio portraits use a pale blue backdrop, and that convention has been repeated so often online that people assume it is the official rule. It is not. The published requirement is a plain, light-coloured background with no shadows, and plain white is the safest reading of that. Blue is a studio habit, not a specification.