TOKYO, April 28 — In his first visit to the United States as Japan 's leader, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe quickly got on a first-name basis with President Bush and secured an invitation to the ranch in Crawford, Tex., for the next time.

If Mr. Abe succeeded in forging a bond with Mr. Bush, another major goal of his trip — heading off a resolution on Japan's wartime sexual slavery in the House of Representatives — yielded mixed results. In both his meeting with House leaders and in his news conference with the president, Mr. Abe offered an apology but used pointedly vague language to sidestep the issue of Japan's responsibility toward the sex slaves, known euphemistically as comfort women.

Mike M. Mochizuki, a Japanese politics specialist at George Washington University , said that Mr. Abe's comments reflected both the vagueness of the Japanese language and a carefully worded script.

On Friday, in two landmark rulings, Japan's Supreme Court rejected compensation claims filed by former sex slaves and forced laborers from China, but acknowledged that they had been coerced by the Japanese military or industry. The judgment was handed down as Mr. Abe wrapped up his tour of the United States and headed to Saudi Arabia, the first stop in a tour of the Middle East.

Last month, Mr. Abe caused a furor in Asia and the United States when he said there was no evidence that the Japanese military had coerced women into sex slavery in World War II, in keeping with longstanding assertions by Japanese nationalists that the women were volunteers or were coerced by third-party private brokers. On March 16, Mr. Abe's comments were endorsed by his cabinet as the official government position.

“He's not taking any responsibility for the military putting us there — he makes it seem as if we just happened to be there,” said Jan Ruff O'Herne, 84, a Dutchwoman who was forced to serve as a sex slave in Indonesia and testified about her experiences at a House panel recently.

Kent Calder, director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins, said Mr. Abe was “finessing his response to try to head off the resolution” in the House while not alienating his nationalist base in Japan.

Representative Mike Honda, the California Democrat who is spearheading the legislation, said he hoped that the House Committee on Foreign Affairs would vote on the resolution next month.

The attention on sex slavery has raised some concerns in the United States about linking American policy in Asia to Japan's current leadership, which is dominated by nationalists who have long argued that historical facts like wartime sex slavery or the Rape of Nanjing were exaggerations or fabrications.

In recent years, the United States and Japan have asserted that their alliance in Asia is based on “common values, especially our commitment to freedom and democracy,” as Mr. Bush said Friday. The countries are strengthening their military alliance even as Japan's revisionist views on history have deepened distrust in the rest of Asia.

Mr. Mochizuki pointed out that Mr. Abe had assigned a new investigation into Japan's wartime sex slavery to a group of nationalist lawmakers from the right wing of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, who have long argued that the women were volunteers.

This is cache, read story here