Another Hollywood "whitewashing" row has broken out after the first image of manga sci-fi thriller Ghost in the Shell featuring Scarlett Johansson as the Japanese character Major Motoko Kusanagi.

The futuristic film, based on the Japanese comics of the same name, is currently shooting in Wellington, New Zealand, in a joint production between Paramount Pictures and Dreamworks, with the Weta Workshop stepping up for special effects.

But social media has erupted in a debate over whether an Asian actor should have been cast for Johansson's role, with an online petition attracting 66,000 signatories to date.

"The original film is set in Japan, and the major cast members are Japanese. So why would the American remake star a white actress?" said the petition's author Julie Rodriguez. "The industry is already unfriendly to Asian actors without roles in major films being changed to exclude them. One recent survey found that in 2013, Asian characters made up only 4.4 per cent of speaking roles in top-grossing Hollywood films."

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One Twitter user, the comic-book writer based in California @jontseui, launched into several tweets complaining that the casting was "not only the erasure of Asian faces but a removal of the story from its core themes".

He said the series reflects Japan's unique relationship with technology and cannot be a story that can be Westernised. "It is inherently a Japanese story, not a universal one," he tweeted.

Many other users expressed dismay over the casting and the "whitewashing complex".

Johansson will play a human-cyborg hybrid who leads an elite taskforce called Section 9, which is charged with wiping out dangerous criminals.

It follows the #OscarsSoWhite controversy at the Academy Awards this year, which attacked the lack of diversity among nominees. 

Aloha, Cameron Crowe's romcom from last year, also came under fire for casting Emma Stone as a character who is of Hawaiian and Chinese descent.