An online petition seeking the dismissal of Waseda University professor Tetsuo Arima, who made controversial remarks about Japan’s wartime sex slavery victims, has drawn more than six-thousand signatures as of Thursday. 

The petition was posted earlier on Tuesday on the Japanese website “Change” by Moving Beyond Hate, a student-led anti-discrimination group based in Japan.  

The group said Arima has made racist comments directed at Koreans and also regularly denies the wartime sexual slavery issue, posing it as “reverse discrimination” towards Japanese people. 

Arima, who teaches social sciences, published a book n July that supports Harvard Law School professor John Mark Ramseyer’s claim that victims of wartime sex slavery were willing prostitutes. 

In the petition, the group expressed serious concerns over Arima, a university professor, engaging in such severe discrimination and denialism. The group called on Waseda University to fire him and investigate whether the professor made discriminatory remarks in his classes.