TOKYO Moving to defuse a heated diplomatic dispute over World War II-era history, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Friday that his government would not revise a landmark 1993 apology to women forced to work in Japanese military brothels.
It was the first time since taking office more than a year ago that Mr. Abe has explicitly stated that his right-wing administration would uphold the official apology, known as the Kono Statement. That statement, issued by Yohei Kono, then the chief cabinet secretary, admitted that Japan’s military played at least an indirect role in forcing the so-called comfort women to provide sex to Japanese soldiers.
“I am deeply pained to think of the comfort women who experienced immeasurable pain and suffering, a feeling I share equally with my predecessors,” Mr. Abe told Parliament. Referring to the Kono Statement, the prime minister said, “The Abe cabinet has no intention to review it.”
Mr. Abe also stated that his administration would uphold a broader apology that the Japanese government issued in 1995 to all victims of Japan’s early 20th-century militarism. Previously, he had spoken in more general terms of the suffering that Japan had caused, and of continuing the position of previous governments on historical issues.
Friday’s statements were among the firmest expressions yet by Mr. Abe that he will adhere to a more moderate line on the emotional historical issues dividing Asia, after concerns that his government may be embracing more apologetic views of Japan’s wartime past. The statements also showed Mr. Abe to be distancing himself from his views before becoming prime minister, when he publicly questioned whether Japan’s imperial military had actually coerced the women, a doubt shared by many Japanese nationalists.
What was less clear was why he waited so long to reaffirm those apologies. Since Mr. Abe took office in December 2012, people close to him have described a constant tug of war in his administration between his moderate advisers, including many former elite civil servants, and his longtime supporters on the political far right, who want him to push back against what they call overly negative views of Japan’s wartime behavior.
Japanese officials suggested that the statements might be part of an effort by Mr. Abe to mend relations with South Korea and to persuade President Park Geun-hye of South Korea to meet him this month on the sidelines of a multinational nuclear security summit meeting in the Netherlands. Ms. Park has so far refused to meet with Mr. Abe until he shows a more remorseful attitude toward Japan’s brutal colonization of the Korean Peninsula.
Mr. Abe’s previous appeals to end what he calls masochistic views of Japan’s history had raised concerns among South Korea and other former victims of Japanese aggression that his administration would seek to whitewash his nation’s wartime atrocities. Even before he took office, American officials warned Mr. Abe that any perceived historical revisionism could isolate Japan at a time when the United States needed its largest Asian ally to help face the challenge of a resurgent China.
Political analysts said they doubted Friday’s statements would be enough to appease Ms. Park, and that Mr. Abe’s real target may be the United States, with whom he has sought to build close ties.
“Seoul continues to harbor the suspicion that the Abe government harbors revisionist views regarding Japan’s history of imperialism and colonial domination,” Thomas Berger, an expert on international relations at Boston University, said in an email.
While Mr. Abe avoided provocative statements during the first year of his current administration, he and his followers have more recently seemed to revert to a more openly nationalistic agenda. This began in late December, when Mr. Abe visited a controversial Tokyo shrine to Japan’s war dead, including 14 executed Class A war criminals, just days after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. urged him by phone not to go.
Tensions over history with South Korea increased sharply last month, when the current chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, said the Abe government would review the testimony of 16 women compelled to work in the military brothels that was used in compiling the 1993 apology. Mr. Suga was responding to growing calls from nationalist lawmakers to scrap the apology, which they say is based on insufficient evidence and unjustly defames the soldiers who died for Japan during the war.
While most historians agree that Japan forced 80,000 to 200,000 women to work in a network of wartime brothels, some nationalist scholars in Japan say the women were just common prostitutes.
Revising the apology would be certain to stir further outrage in South Korea, where many of the women came from, and which has called for Japan to make a stronger show of remorse while the last of the former brothel workers, now in their 80s and 90s, are still alive.
On Friday, Mr. Abe appeared to be trying to set to rest concerns that he would change or even scrap the Kono Statement. Japanese officials also expressed confidence that his comments would allay concerns in Washington and elsewhere that Mr. Abe was sliding into a more emotionally right-wing agenda.
“We must be humble in front of history,” Mr. Abe told lawmakers. “The issues of history should not be politicized or be turned into a diplomatic issue. Research on history should be entrusted to experts and historians.”
A version of this article appears in print on March 15, 2014, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Japan Stands by Apology to Its Wartime Sex Slaves.