A group of 444 lawyers, scholars, journalists and concerned members of the public is calling on a university to stand up to anonymous threats seeking the dismissal of one of its lecturers.
On Monday they launched a support group to defend Takashi Uemura, a former Asahi Shimbun journalist who in the 1990s contributed to the newspaper's now partly discredited coverage of Japan's forced recruitment of "comfort women" for military brothels.
Hokusei Gakuen University in Sapporo said it has received numerous emails, phone calls and faxes demanding that it fire Uemura. One of the anonymous messages threatened to detonate a bomb on its campus if the demand was not met.