Japan's outspoken finance minister has refused to resign or apologise over remarks suggesting the country should follow the Nazi example of how to change its constitution stealthily and without public debate.

Taro Aso "retracted" the comments yesterday, following protests by neighbouring countries and human rights activists, but today refused to go further.

"I have no intention to step down" as cabinet minister or MP, Mr Aso, who is also deputy prime minister, told reporters. The government also said it was not seeking Mr Aso's resignation, demanded by some opposition members.

Mr Aso, who is known for intemperate remarks, sparked outrage for saying Japan should learn from how the Nazi party stealthily changed Germany's pre-war constitution before anyone realised it.

He also suggested that Japanese politicians should make visit Tokyo's Yasukuni war shrine, which commemorates the country's 2.3 million war dead, including 14 leaders convicted of war crimes, quietly to avoid controversy.

Such visits currently take place amid wide publicity and are a sore point for south-east Asian nations which suffered under Japanese occupation during the Second World War.

Mr Aso said yesterday he was misunderstood and meant only to say that loud debate over whether Japan should change its post-war constitution and other issues was not helpful.

In retracting his comments, he said it was "very unfortunate and regrettable" that they were misinterpreted.

But he said today he stood by all his other remarks in the speech made earlier this week in Tokyo to an ultra-conservative audience.

Critics of the ruling Liberal Democrats are uneasy over the party's proposals for revising the US-inspired post-war constitution, in part to allow a higher profile for Japan's military.

Japan and Nazi Germany were wartime allies when Japan occupied much of Asia and Germany much of Europe, where the racial supremacist Nazis oversaw the killings of an estimated six million Jews before the war ended in 1945.

Japan's history of military aggression, which included colonising the Korean Peninsula before the war, is the reason its current constitution limits the role of the military.

According to a transcript of the speech published by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, Mr Aso condemned the lack of support for revising Japan's pacifist constitution among older people, saying the Liberal Democrats had held quiet, extensive discussions about its proposals.

"I don't want to see this done in the midst of an uproar," he said, according to the transcript. Since revisions of the constitution may raise protests, "doing it quietly, just as in one day the Weimar constitution changed to the Nazi constitution, without anyone realising it, why don't we learn from that sort of tactic?".

Government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said post-war Japan had consistently supported peace and human rights.

"Cabinet ministers should fully understand their role and make sure to avoid misleading remarks," he said today. But he said Mr Aso had already retracted the Nazi comment and did not have to resign.

Mr Aso often speaks in a meandering style that has landed him in trouble for off-the-cuff remarks in the past. He has apologised previously for accusing the elderly of being a burden on society, joking about people with Alzheimer's disease, saying the ideal country would be one that attracts "the richest Jewish people" and comparing the opposition Democratic Party of Japan to the Nazis.

Yesterday he insisted that he was referring to the Nazis "as a bad example of a constitutional revision that was made without national understanding or discussion ...I just don't want (the revision) to be decided amid a ruckus".

The Nazis' rise to power in the early 1930s amid the economic crisis brought on by the Great Depression was helped by emergency decrees that circumvented the Weimar constitution, as was Adolf Hitler's seizure of absolute power after he was made chancellor in 1933. It was not a matter of revising, but of abusing the constitution.

Opposition leaders condemned Mr Aso's remarks, saying they showed a lack of understanding of history and hurt Japan's national interest. Some demanded that he resign.

Mr Aso's comments "sounded like praise for Nazi actions and are totally incomprehensible," said Akihiro Ohata, secretary general of the Democratic Party.

"Minister Aso's ignorance about historical facts is so obvious," said Seiji Mataichi, secretary general of the Social Democratic Party. "I also want to remind him that praising the Nazis is considered a crime in EU nations."

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a group dedicated to keeping alive the history of the Holocaust, urged Mr Aso to "immediately clarify" his remarks.

"What 'techniques' from the Nazis' governance are worth learning? How to stealthily cripple democracy?" Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the centre, said.

In South Korea, Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho Tai-young said Mr Aso's remark "will obviously hurt many people" and in China, which also suffered invasion and occupation by Japanese imperial troops before and during the war, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said the comments showed that "Japan's neighbours in Asia, and the international community, have to heighten their vigilance over the direction of Japan's development".