The Japanese Prime Minister has inflamed controversy about the country’s brutal military record by promising support to a group of right-wing politicians who deny the existence of hundreds of thousands of wartime military sex slaves.

Shinzo Abe said that his Government would co-operate with a proposal to “reinvestigate” a 1993 Cabinet statement, which admitted that many women were tricked or coerced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military.

Although he has not renounced the Kono statement, named after the minister who issued it, Mr Abe’s utterances in the past few days have left no doubt that he disagrees with its spirit. Stung by the furious reaction to the Prime Minister’s remarks overseas, the Government attacked foreign journalists today for “inaccuracy” in reporting his words.

The controversy is provoking ill-feeling towards Japan not only among its former wartime colonies, but also in the US, which Mr Abe will visit as Prime Minister for the first time next month. It feeds into a growing spirit of revisionism in Japanese society and an increasingly defiant refusal to accept the Western historical consensus about atrocities committed by the imperial forces.

“For the honour of the former Japanese military, we have to counter criticism which is based on a misunderstanding,” said Nariaki Nakayama, head of the group of members of Mr Abe’s ruling Liberal Democrats, who reject the 1993 apology over “comfort women” made by Yohei Kono, then the Chief Cabinet Secretary.

Thousands of women from Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines and the Netherlands, as well as China and Korea, have identified themselves as surviving comfort women. Hundreds have spoken about being forced or tricked to travel to “comfort stations”, and of rape, beatings and forced abortion and venereal disease.

To Mr Abe, however, the accounts do not amount to proof. “None of the evidence confirmed coercion in the narrow sense — coercion like the hunting of comfort women, with officials rushing into houses to drag women out, like kidnapping them,” he has said. In fact, some comfort women do speak of such experiences. More describe sexual violation.

Mr Abe claims to stand by the Kono statement, despite disagreeing with one of its assertions — “that, in many cases [the women] were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion etc, and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part . . . They lived in misery . . . under a coercive atmosphere.”

It is clear that Mr Nakayama and his group have made up their minds what the result of their investigation will be, and Mr Abe will face renewed pressure to renounce the apology.

“The issue bears on the image of Japan,” Qin Giang, a Chinese government spokesman, said. “The proper solution of the issue is an important foundation for . . . China-Japan relations.”

US newspapers have carried editorials criticising Mr Abe, and a group of congressmen have tabled a resolution demanding that Japan should apologise over the women.

Yasuhisa Shiozaki, the Chief Cabinet Secretary, said: “Reports are being made without an appropriate interpretation of the Prime Minister’s remarks. We are considering . . . a rebuttal.”

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