A 97-year-old scientist who was forced to work for Japan’s war effort is now waging a battle against Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s refusal to appoint six scholars to the Science Council of Japan.

Yoshinobu Masuda, a council member in the 1970s and 1980s, submitted to the government a petition with more than 60,000 signatures he collected online, demanding that Suga retract his rejections.

Masuda described his move on April 19 as a desperate effort to prevent the issue from becoming forgotten half a year after it first came to public attention and raised questions about academic freedom.

Masuda, a meteorologist, started the petition in March out of fear that the public was fast losing interest in the issue as the public and news organizations have been focused on the novel coronavirus pandemic.

“The independence of the council has been threatened,” he said at a news conference on April 19 before he submitted the signatures to the Cabinet Office, which has oversight over the council. “Many people are concerned.”

It came to light in October that Suga decided to refuse to appoint six of 105 academics as new members of the council, a representative body of Japanese scientists of all fields.

The council makes policy recommendations independent from the government. It was established after World War II by scientists who reflected on their cooperation with Japan’s war effort. The council opposes military-related research.

In 1942, Masuda joined what is now the Meteorological College, an institution to train employees of the Meteorological Agency of Japan.

As a second lieutenant, he was later assigned to the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Taisha Base in Shimane Prefecture in western Japan. His task was to provide meteorological information, such as wind directions, to bomber crews.

In the closing days of World War II, the Japanese military deployed large numbers of young members for kamikaze suicide missions. They flew off with just enough fuel to reach Okinawa, where a bloody battle with the U.S. military was being fought.

Military leaders told the pilots that that kamikaze, which means divine wind in Japanese, would blow to help Japan turn around the war despite the increasingly bleak prospects.

“I was appalled by the absurdity of what the military had been doing and saying,” Masuda recalled. “As an expert on meteorology, I knew that there is no such thing as a divine wind blowing (in favor of Japan).”

But he could not voice his opinion because raising doubts about the military was taboo back then.

After the war ended, he worked at the agency as a weather forecaster.

He was elected to the Science Council in 1977, when he was a member of the Meteorological Society of Japan. He served two terms on the council.

Later, the government led by the Liberal Democratic Party revised the law governing the Science Council to allow the council to nominate its new members. The government was supposed to approve any new members recommended by the council under the new setup.

But Suga broke with the long-time practice.

Suga’s rejection of the six recommended scholars was a bitter reminder for Masuda of the wartime government’s intervention into the academic world. During the war, scientists, including himself, were forced to cooperate with Japan’s war effort.

Some of the rejected scholars had voiced their opposition to the contentious security legislation enacted in 2015 that expanded the overseas role of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces through a reinterpretation of war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution.

Masuda turned to Facebook to voice his objection to the Suga government.

He wrote: “I totally disagree with the government’s refusal to appoint the new members.” That post was shared more than 1,000 times.

Six months on, the prime minister has still not provided a clear reason for the rejections. He has repeated that he will “refrain from commenting on matters related to personnel affairs.”

At the news conference, Masuda said he will not back down.

“I will do all I can to stop the government from transforming the council into an organization different from the one that was intended,” he said.