China and Republic of Korea (ROK) have rebuked a senior Japanese politician for playing down the Nanjing Massacre and Japan's annexation of the Korean Peninsula.

Takami Eto, a 78-year-old three-time Cabinet minister who leads the third-largest faction in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, dismissed as "a big lie'' estimates that the Japanese army killed as many as 300,000 civilians during the 1937-38 occupation of Nanjing, called the Nanjing Massacre.

China on Sunday accused Eto of trying to whitewash history.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said there was "ironclad evidence'' the Nanjing Massacre was "an atrocity committed by Japanese militarism during the war of aggression in China.''

Any attempts to "distort or deny history'' would be unsuccessful, the spokesman said in a statement.

A ROK Foreign Ministry official warned that a failure to come to grips with the past could set back future relations between the two neighbours.

The spokesman told reporters on Sunday that the ROK was "disappointed'' with the politician for falsely claiming the annexation of the Korean Peninsula in 1910 was lawful as it had been approved by the League of Nations.

"The ROK thinks that such incorrect remarks will not do Seoul-Tokyo ties any good,'' a ministry statement said.

"Relations between the ROK and Japan will not really develop unless they are based on a true account of their shared history.''

In 1995, Eto resigned as chief of the then Management and Co-ordination Agency after commenting that Japan did some good on the Korean Peninsula during its 1910-1945 colonial rule.

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