SEOUL - Lee Ok-sun points to a scar left by the bayonet of a Japanese soldier she says forced her to work as a sex slave in the 1940s, and wonders how Japan's prime minister can possibly doubt that there was coercion.

"Now the Japanese are saying such things didn't happen and no one was taken forcefully," Lee said. "Their soldiers would stab girls in the arm if they didn't behave."

"I was out on an errand when I was 16 when I was kidnapped. People say Japanese are bad but there were bad Koreans too. Two people kidnapped me - one Japanese and one Korean," she said. 

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, seeking to bolster support within his conservative base, has stirred anger in China, Taiwan and South Korea by appearing to question the state's role in forcing women to be sex slaves for its soldiers during World War Two.

Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 until the 1945 end of the war.

Lee, now 81, said she was taken to a frontline brothel run by Japan's Imperial Army in China. Abandoned after the war, she spent nearly 60 years in China and only recently returned to South Korea to find most of her family in Pusan had died.

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Almost every week for more than 15 years, Korean women who were kept in the brothels have gathered outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul to provide what they say is a living reminder of a dark chapter in Japan's past.

Lee Yong-soo, 79, has been one of the most active former sex slaves - euphemistically called "comfort women" - taking part in the protests.

"Abe is making absurd remarks," Lee said. "They made us become comfort women. I am living proof of what happened."

Lee said two women lured her out of her home when she was 16 and she was kidnapped by soldiers who were with them. She was then detained in a Japanese military brothel in Taiwan.

"Nothing has changed about me or what happened except for the fact that I got old. Abe is ignoring us completely," Lee said.

As each year passes, the number of the women declines.

Among the tens of thousands from the Korean peninsula, there are 123 surviving Korean sex slaves who have registered with the government, South Korea's Ministry of Gender Equality and Family said.

Last Thursday, Abe said: "There is no evidence to back up that there was coercion as defined initially," apparently referring to accusations that the Imperial Army had kidnapped women and put them in brothels to serve soldiers.

However, he has also stood by a 1993 apology acknowledging coercion.

"The situation in Japan is only getting worse with Abe denying their war crimes with the comfort women," said Choi Jin-mi, on organiser of the 50-strong protest held right outside the office window of the Japanese ambassador to South Korea.