GWANGJU, South Korea, April 6 (Yonhap) -- In a small, dimly lit room, 81-year-old Yi Ok-seon sits still on her bed, gazing into a corner and whispering to herself that she should have died long ago. She is one of tens of thousands of women forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan's World War II soldiers.

Yi believes she does not have long to live yet insists that she cannot die before Japan truly atones for the crime against humanity it committed and apologizes to her and other former sex slaves, commonly called "comfort women."

Japan insists that it feels remorse and has done enough for the victims of its past militarism, but its Asian neighbors do not think so. The Korean Peninsula was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945.

The dispute was rekindled in late March when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe suggested that there was no evidence supporting that imperial Japan forced or coerced young women into its military brothels during World War II.

His comment spurred intense criticism from neighboring countries and even from the United States, where Congress is debating over a resolution calling on Japan to make an unambiguous apology.

Abe tried to quell the furor by offering what critics called a half-hearted apology to the estimated 200,000 "comfort women" from Korea, China, Indonesia, the Philippines and the Netherlands.

Ahead of a scheduled trip to Washington in May, Abe even called U.S. President George W. Bush to clarify his position on the issue. However, damage has already been done again to Yi and many other victims of Japan's wartime atrocities.

"I feel mortified to hear that a Japanese politician named Abe said we volunteered to serve in Japanese army brothels," Yi said. "It just makes everything meaningless and makes me want to end it all. No matter how much I try to tell people it's not true, nothing seems to change."

Yi, along with about a dozen other comfort women, lives at a privately funded shelter in Gwangju, a city just outside Seoul. The facility, The House of Sharing, includes a small museum that displays replicas, photos and paintings depicting a wartime Japanese brothel.

Yi said she was only 16 when she was stopped on a street in her hometown of Busan in 1942 and sent to a "comfort station" set up at a Japanese air base in China, where she was forced to have sex with up to 10 soldiers on a weekday and as many as 40 a day on a weekend.

"I was grabbed by my arms on the street by two bulky men while I was running an errand for my parents," she said. "They yanked me into a truck loaded with other women and sent us to China by train."

"I tried to run away many times, but in vain. I was brought back for beatings," she said, pointing to her ears that were severely hearing impaired. "The remarks by the Japanese prime minister that we went there on our own choice hurts me more."

Kim Gun-ja, 81, another former sex slave living next door at the shelter, was entrapped in the tragedy when she, then 17, followed a man that her foster parent, a Korean man working for Japanese police, said would give her a job.

"I think my life has been one of misery," she said. "All I have now is a body that aches so much that I rarely want to leave my room these days."

Despite their failing health, the few surviving comfort women still manage to attend a small weekly rally that has been held more than 750 times since 1992 in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. At the Wednesday noon protest, they, joined by supporters, demand the full disclose of Japan's wartime records and its genuine apology.

Tokyo started a privately funded campaign in 1995 to compensate former sex slaves. However, all but some 360 women rejected the offer, accusing the Japanese government of dodging responsibility by using private money to resolve the issue. The campaign ended last week.

Yi, who was among those who snubbed the fund, said she wants to be more vigorous in her protest. To help serve her purpose, she said, she has been studying Japanese and Chinese grammar.

"Learning is hard at my age, but I have to tell my stories in my own words to young people of other countries," Yi said. "Wanting to speak out, I think, also relates to my father."

Her father, a menial construction worker, would bring a neatly shaved bamboo stick home every time one of his 13 children did something wrong, and gather them up to cane the oldest for each fault they made.

After the war ended in 1945, Yi returned home only to learn that her father, too, had been taken by Japan to an unknown place, where he died at an unknown date.

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