Number of comfort women

The Book of World War II has a long account on the number of comfort women. Lack of official documentation has made estimates of the total number of comfort women difficult, as vast amounts of material pertaining to matters related to war crimes and the war responsibility of the nation's highest leaders were destroyed on the orders of the Japanese government at the end of the war. Historians have arrived at various estimates by looking at surviving documentation which indicate the ratio of the number of soldiers in a particular area to the number of women, as well as looking at replacement rates of the women. Historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi, who conducted the first academic study on the topic which brought the issue out into the open, estimated the number to be between 50,000 and 200,000.

Based on these estimates, most international media sources quote about 200,000 young women were recruited or kidnapped by soldiers to serve in Japanese military brothels. The BBC quotes "200,000 to 300,000" and the International Commission of Jurists quotes "estimates of historians of 100,000 to 200,000 women."

After the war, a BC-level court martial brought to trial the Japanese military officials who forced the Dutch in the camps to be sent to comfort stations. The WW II story states of the 13 individuals accused in relation to the Semarang Incident, the Batavia Temporary Court Martial on February 14, 1948, sentenced Army Major Okada to death. Eleven others were sentenced to prison terms ranging from two to twenty years. Prosecutors did not succeed in convicting anybody in relation to the Muntilan case, which ended in acquittal.

Court records of the Semarang Incident have survived, and the Dutch Government commissioned a study of Dutch government documents on the forced prostitution of Dutch women at the Dutch East Indies under Japanese occupation. According to the published report , 200 to 300 Dutch women worked at Japanese military brothels, of which “some sixty five were most certainly forced into prostitution.” And that was the most pathetic situation in the Book of World War II.