A South Korean woman who says she was forced to work in a Japanese military brothel as a girl in the 1940s demanded Friday that the government admit that the Imperial Japanese Army was involved in managing the brothels and extend an official apology to the victims.

"What I want is to take back my dignity and honor," Kim Bok-dong, 88, one of the few surviving "comfort women," Japan's euphemism for the thousands of girls and women coerced into sexual slavery during the war, told the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo.

Kim said she was approached in 1940 with an offer to work at a factory making army uniforms, but was instead taken to a military brothel in Guangdong province, China. She was only 14 at the time, she said.

"At that time I had no choice but to go," she said, explaining that her family would have been called traitors if she had not complied. Japan had annexed the Korean Peninsula in 1910.

She said one of the three men who came to take her was wearing what looked like a military uniform.

Supporters at the news conference, including Haruki Wada, professor emeritus at University of Tokyo, said the man was a civilian employee of the Japanese military.

When she arrived in Guangdong, Kim found that she had been deceived and was then forced to provide sex to the soldiers, she said.

She said that she would be beaten if she disobeyed, adding that her life there "was not like that of a human being."

Kim said she wants Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to admit the legal responsibility of the Imperial Japanese military and extend an official apology.

"I sincerely hope that Prime Minister Abe will respond differently to this and help us settle the issue," she said.

What Abe has admitted is that many women became victims of "human trafficking," wording apparently selected to imply they were recruited by private-sector brokers, not by the army or other authorities.

Kim's supporters said they drafted recommendations last year for how Japan can solve the issue, after holding discussions with survivors and supporters in eight nations. They submitted the proposal to the government but received no response, they said.