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SAN JOSE, Calif.

ON a recent sunny Sunday morning, Michael M. Honda was kicking back at his 90-year-old mother’s house here, some green tea and rice crackers within arm’s reach. She was off to church, and his younger brother had dropped by to fix the plumbing.

“Oh yeah, I ran across a buddy of yours — he says he golfs with you — a big-set hakujin guy,” Mr. Honda told his brother, using the Japanese word for Caucasian.

Mr. Honda, a Democratic congressman and third-generation Japanese-American, was wrapping up a weekend visit to his district here in Silicon Valley. After attending an event at a local high school, he would fly back to Washington, where his resolution calling on the Japanese government to unequivocally acknowledge its history of wartime sex slavery and apologize for it was steadily gaining co-sponsors.

The resolution was also drawing sometimes surprising reaction in , making Mr. Honda one of the most famous American congressmen in his ancestral land and riling Japan’s conservatives. They have accused a bemused Mr. Honda, 65, of being an agent of a Chinese government bent on humiliating Japan on American soil. During one television interview, an announcer asked Mr. Honda how he could back such a resolution when he has a Japanese face.

“I told her I could have a black face, a brown face, a white face — I could be Mexican, I could be Indian — it doesn’t matter,” Mr. Honda recalled.

He said he saw the resolution, which has received strong backing from Korean-American groups, as an affirmation of universal human rights. His foes in Japan view it through the prism of Northeast Asia’s stark divisions.

The House Committee on Foreign Affairs, led by Representative Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California, is expected to vote on the resolution later in May. Mr. Lantos supported a similar resolution, sponsored by Lane Evans, an Illinois Democrat who was forced to retire last year because of Parkinson’s disease, that wilted in the Republican-controlled Congress.

Although the resolution is not binding, the Japanese government, with the support of the Bush administration, has lobbied fiercely against it. The resolution drew little attention until Prime Minister , who has long pressed a revisionist view of Japan’s wartime history, denied that the Japanese military had coerced women into sex slavery, causing furor in the rest of Asia and the United States.

During his recent visit to Washington, Mr. Abe told House leaders and President Bush in carefully calculated language that he apologized for Japan’s history with the women, known euphemistically as comfort women, but he did not take back his initial denial. A news conference with Mr. Bush culminated in an odd moment when the president said he accepted Mr. Abe’s apology.

The apology, Mr. Honda said, was not Mr. Bush’s to accept.

MR. HONDA’S grandparents came from Kumamoto, a prefecture in southwestern Japan, in the early 1900s, part of the first wave of Japanese immigrants to the United States. His mother, Fusako, was born in San Jose’s Japantown in 1916 and grew up there. His father, Giichi, was also born and raised in California, but spent some years living in Tokyo.

After the outbreak of war between the United States and Japan in 1941, his family, like other Japanese-Americans, was sent to an internment camp in Colorado. They spent a total of 14 months there — an experience that would later influence Mr. Honda’s politics.

“It taught me that if governments make mistakes, they should apologize,” he said.

The family returned to San Jose a few years after the end of the war. At home, the father spoke in English to Mr. Honda and his younger brother and sister; his mother addressed them in Japanese. To this day, Mr. Honda has retained the habit of sprinkling his English with some Japanese words when he speaks with relatives or Japanese-Americans. Japanese food was served at home.

“The only American food I remember eating was Spam,” he said.

His parents struggled, working as strawberry sharecroppers, though his father eventually found more stable employment in the post office. His mother cleaned houses.

“As I went into politics, people would say, ‘I know you from someplace,’ because I used to go pick up my mom from different places,” Mr. Honda said. “All the places she would clean were homes of prominent people. 1 /n /n