TOKYO — Japan temporarily recalled its ambassador to China on Sunday in response to renewed friction over a disputed island group, while it faces discord with its allies South Korea and the United States over women forced to work in Japanese brothels during World War II.

Though minor, the diplomatic flare-ups underscore how disagreements over history and territory continue to isolate Japan from the rest of Asia. They come after several years of relative calm in which Tokyo seemed to mend fences with neighbors still traumatized by Imperial Japan’s brutal, early-20th-century march across Asia.

The dispute over Asian and Dutch women forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers in wartime brothels has even put Tokyo at odds with its postwar protector, the United States. Unconfirmed reports that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has banned the use of the Japanese euphemism “comfort women” in favor of the more direct “sex slaves” prompted a curt retort last week in the Japanese Parliament by the foreign minister, Koichiro Gemba, who called the latter term “a mistaken expression.”

Under its conservative prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, Japan has tried to challenge some of the assertions about the women, who many historians say were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military but who many Japanese say willfully worked as prostitutes. Those assertions have drawn angry reactions in South Korea, where they are seen as signs that Tokyo remains unrepentant for its harsh colonization of the Korean Peninsula. On July 9, an irate South Korean drove his truck into the front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.