Hong Kong activists on Monday started to collect signatures to protest against controversial Japanese history textbooks accused of glossing over the country's wartime atrocities.

The group, called the committee to safeguard historical facts, collected signatures on the streets of several Hong Kong districts saying that the books contained distorted historical facts.

Group convenor and Democratic Party legislator Albert Ho told reporters there were many people in Hong Kong who had spoken of the harsh treatment they had received during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong between 1941-1945 in World War II.

History could not be changed, he said.

The activists said they feared the books could lead to a re-emergence of Japanese militarism.

The committee plans to hand over the signatures to Japanese consulate officials in Hong Kong during a protest march due on July 7, when in 1937 the Japanese invasion of China started following the Marco Polo bridge incidents in Beijing.

The group said it also opposed Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's plan visit to the Yasukuni Shrine to Japan's war dead.

Despite opposition from within his country and several Asian states, Koizumi has vowed to visit the Tokyo shrine on the anniversary of Japan's surrender on August 15.

One of the controversial books in particular reportedly skims over the 1937 Nanjing Massacre -- in which historians say at least 300,000 civilians were slaughtered -- saying it was an "incident" in which "many" Chinese were killed.

It avoids references to Japan's pre-World War II invasion of its Asian neighbours and plays downs the use of tens of thousands of Asian women as sex slaves for Japanese troops.

It was edited by the Society for History Textbook Reform, a group of avowedly nationalist historians who assert Japan has become too "masochistic" in assessing its past.

The book's clearance in April by the government as suitable for use in schools provoked an angry reaction in several Asian countries invaded by Japan, souring relations with China and South Korea in particular.