TOKYO — Japan will re-examine a landmark apology it made two decades ago to women forced to work in Japanese wartime military brothels, a government spokesman said on Friday, in a move that could further outrage South Korea, where many of the women came from.

The spokesman, Yoshihide Suga, the chief cabinet secretary, said a team of scholars would examine what historical evidence had been used in composing the apology, known as the Kono Statement. The statement, issued in 1993 by the chief cabinet secretary at the time, Yohei Kono, acknowledged for the first time that the Imperial military had been at least indirectly involved in coercing those known euphemistically as “comfort women” to provide sex to Japanese soldiers during World War II.

Mr. Suga did not say whether the inquiry could possibly lead to a scrapping of the statement, an action that would most likely draw an explosive reaction from South Korea, where the women are seen as an emotionally potent symbol of their nation’s brutal early-20th-century colonization by Japan.

It was also unclear whether Mr. Suga was offering to form the team simply as a way to deflect pressure from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s supporters in the political far right. They have argued that the statement should be scrapped because, they say, there is insufficient objective evidence supporting the testimony of the women that the Japanese military forced them to provide sex. (Most scholars reject that, saying the military was at least indirectly complicit because it allowed the brothels to operate.)