“We are enraged,” said Rechilda Extremadura, executive director of Lila Pilipina, an organization of activists and former Filipino wartime sex slaves.

“We will not allow them to deny it just like that,” Extremadura said. “For us, good or bad, it is your history. If you are a responsible government, you are responsible enough to accept, acknowledge and be accountable.”

Responding to a recent U.S. congressional resolution calling for Japan’s leader to formally acknowledge and apologize for the wartime sexual slavery, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters in Tokyo on Thursday that “there was no evidence to prove there was coercion as initially suggested.”

Hilaria Bustamante, an 81-year-old member of Lila Pilipina, said she was a sex slave in a Japanese garrison for more than a year.

Recounting her horror, she said she was heading home in 1942 after scavenging for rice grains at a farm when three Japanese soldiers stopped her on the road and seized her by the arms and legs and threw her into a truck “like a pig.”

“Even as I struggled, I could not do anything. They slapped me, they punched me. I was only 16 then, what could I do?” she said. “They think we are like toilet paper that is just thrown after being used.”

Rep. Liza Maza of the left-wing Gabriela women’s party said Abe’s statement was “an affront to all women victims of Japanese military sexual slavery” during the war.

“My God! There are so many living survivors of such atrocity,” she said.

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