SAN FRANCISCO, April 28 -- Some 500 people from the Chinese American and Korean American communities protested here on Tuesday against Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's continued efforts to distort historic facts.

"No Cover up of War Crimes!" screamed one poster. The protest outside the Japanese consulate in San Francisco, on the west coast, was organized by the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WWII in Asia together with Korean community groups. It came as Abe is visiting U.S. this week.

The consulate declined to have any one receive the letter from the protesters.

Abe is in Washington D.C. on Tuesday and will be in San Francisco as part of his U.S. tour. He has been criticized for trying to brush aside Japan's wartime atrocities, especially relating to the issue of some 200,000 "comfort women" from Korea and China, who had been forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese soldiers during the Second World War.

In his speech on Monday at Harvard University, Abe said: "My heart aches when I think about the people who were victimized by human trafficking and who were subject to immeasurable pain and suffering beyond description," a clear note that Japan's military is not responsible for the tragedy of comfort women.

At a joint press conference with Obama on Tuesday, Abe again stopped short of a full apology for the atrocities committed by Japanese army during the war.

While U.S. President Barack Obama held talks with the Japanese Prime Minister at the White House Tuesday, nearly two hundred people held signs and shouted slogans in a protest a few blocks away against Abe's handling of history issues, demanding the Japanese leader to unequivocally apologize for his country's wartime crimes.

Abe's attitude toward history has strained Japan's ties with neighboring countries including China and South Korea.