When Honda Motor Company said two months ago that it would no longer use Takata as supplier of its airbags, the automaker said that testing data on the airbags had been “misrepresented and manipulated.”

Now, newly obtained internal emails suggest the manipulation was both bold and broad, involving open exchanges among Takata employees in Japan and the United States.

“Happy Manipulating!!!” a Takata airbag engineer, Bob Schubert, wrote in one email dated July 6, 2006, in a reference to results of airbag tests. In another, he wrote of changing the colors or lines in a graphic “to divert attention” from the test results and “to try to dress it up.”

The emails were among documents unsealed recently as part of a personal injury lawsuit against Takata and obtained by The New York Times. Takata said in a statement that the exchanges concerned only the formatting of data and were unrelated to defective airbags that are under recall.