Roh in a speech marking the 1919 uprising in Korea against Japanese colonial rule said the international community had not forgiven Tokyo for its wartime aggression.

"(Japan) may try to cover the sky with its hand, but we were able to confirm once again that the international community does not forgive the atrocities committed by imperial Japan," the South Korean president said.

Japan colonized the Korean peninsula from 1910 until its defeat in World War Two in 1945. Former Japanese prime ministers have apologized for the country's colonial past, but Roh has said Tokyo had not done enough to back its words with action.

"We hope that Japan will not try to glorify or justify a mistaken past, but instead show sincerity by following its conscience and the international community's generally accepted precedent," he said.

Roh spoke of harrowing tales of abuse related by three women who were forced into sexual servitude by Japan during the war in testimony to the U.S. Congress last month.

SEX SLAVE APOLOGY
Two South Koreans and a Dutch-born Australian woman rejected Japan's official apologies as an insult and said Tokyo's efforts to atone for their ordeal were insufficient because they were not accompanied by offers of government compensation.

"Recently, at a U.S. lower house hearing on comfort women, there was vivid testimony by elderly women who had to endure hardship and persecution beyond any human imagination," Roh said.

Japan in 1993 acknowledged a state role in the wartime brothel program and later issued apologies and set up the Asian Women's Fund. About 285 of the women who accepted payments of about $20,000 from that fund received personal apologies from Japan's prime minister.

But in a move likely to upset South Korea, some Japanese ruling party lawmakers planned to urge the government to water down parts of the 1993 apology, a news report said.

The group of Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers said the apology -- dubbed the Kono statement after the chief cabinet secretary at the time, Yohei Kono -- "damaged Japan's image and invited misunderstanding of the facts", the Yomiuri Shimbun quoted the group as saying.

The current chief government spokesman, Yasuhisa Shiozaki, said on Thursday that Tokyo stood by the apology.

But he said parts of the U.S. Congressional resolution "are not based on facts" and the Japanese government had conveyed this to the House.

Japan's ties with both South Korea and China have been further strained in recent years over its leaders' visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine, seen as a symbol of its past militarism because World War Two leaders convicted as war criminals are honored there along with millions of war dead.