Chinese supermarkets even began a boycott of Japanese foods after the book, produced by a right-wing publishing house, was approved by the Japanese Ministry of Education yesterday.

The book removes all mention of the Japanese military’s use of Chinese and Korean women as sex slaves, plays down the death toll of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China and simplifies descriptions of Chinese and Korean workers being forcibly shipped to Japan during the Second World War.

The South Korean Foreign Ministry said that the chapter dealing with Japan’s prewar imperial record amounted to a “serious distortion of history”.

It questioned “whether it will be possible for future generations to forge ahead in the direction of peace, coexistence and co-operation”.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry summoned the Japanese Ambassador to protest and called the book a “poison for Japan’s younger generations”, and said it “tries to exonerate the Japanese imperialists from the crimes they committed”.

The Association of Chinese Retailers called for a boycott of Japanese products, specifically Asahi Beer and the food giant Ajinomoto, because senior advisers to those companies sit on the Japanese Society for Textbook History Reform — a panel with notoriously nationalistic views. Fuso Publishing, which produces the books, accuses mainstream Japanese history textbooks of “self-denigration”.

For decades, Japanese textbooks have caused anger in Asia, with critics saying that they present too uncritical a view of their country’s past. When this book was first approved, in 2001, South Korea recalled its Ambassador for nine days in outrage.

The latest row comes at a time of great tension between Japan and its two neighbours. Seoul is furious over Tokyo’s claim to two tiny islands lying between the countries. Beijing is embroiled in an acrimonious battle with Tokyo over resource rights in the northern Pacific and bitterly opposes Japan’s ambition to win a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

The Japanese Vice-Foreign Minister urged the Chinese Ambassador yesterday to secure the safety of Japanese nationals in China, after a week of anti- Japanese street protests in Chengdu and Shenzhen, in which a Japanese-owned supermarket was vandalised.

Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese Prime Minister, urged South Korea yesterday to exercise self-restraint, saying: “South Korea and Japan have a different stance, but it is not good to widen confrontation.”

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