Education minister Nariaki Nakayama said Saturday that history textbooks used in secondary schools contain passages that are extremely "self-torturing" and suggest "Japan has done nothing but bad things."
After making the remark at a public meeting in Beppu, Oita Prefecture, Nakayama attempted to play down his words.
He told a news conference he should judge textbooks from a "neutral" standpoint given his capacity as minister in charge of screening them.
Nakayama, 61, heads the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry.
Neighboring Asian countries, mainly China and South Korea, which were occupied by Japan, have said textbooks used at Japanese public schools distort history and gloss over wartime atrocities.
At the meeting, Nakayama also said, "Every country's history has light and shadow. While we must reflect on bad deeds, we must not conduct education on the basis of a self-torturing historical perspective that everything that has been done was bad."
The dispute over history textbooks intensified in 2001 when the Tokyo education board adopted a textbook authored by a group of "revisionist" scholars who, like Nakayama, said conventional Japanese textbooks carried passages that make the nation look bad.