The spin Extrange wants to put on it is very transparent:

One point about this manga that everyone notice: It’s ecchii, with some sex scenes (but nothing very explicit or hardcore).

and

My Lovely Ghost Kana is in it’s essence a manga about love and hope.

The “some sex scenes” above must be a new euphemism for “complete chapters such as ch.3″.

The charitable explanation is Extrange being in denial. I’m no expert in ecchi, but Japanese mangaka commonly blow a bit of romantic and/or philosophical smoke, to make things more interesting. For example, let’s look at a well-known Azumanga doujin, the name of which I’ve forgotten, and so I usually call it “Osaka in Love”. It has a few panels with Osaka acting upon her love confusion, and it’s charming.

Nonetheless no sane person would ever claim that’s anything other than a porn doujin. But Kana is exactly the same! In fact, I’m pretty certain there’s more frames of characters having sex in it than in most doujishi I’ve seen (I like my fluff). Sure, Mrs. Tanaka draws carefully around the throbbing members, which is why Kana is soft porn, but still a porn. And YKK is not porn. Let’s be honest about it.

What does this mean? I think the writing is on the wall for animebloggers: sex it up or die.

BTW, I mentioned before how I introduced buddies from my jeep club (actually, “get out into a desert and drink while watching porn” club) to anime, by showing them Dragon Half. The shock was pretty good. But better yet, it caused at least one of them to turn to hentai big way. He said, plain anime never kept his interest, but tentacles… those were intriguing.

QUICK UPDATE: Mike noticed that, outside of the screencap above, Google reports that Philippinians [*] are first in the world in hentai. Are they perverts? Well, a trend for “anime, hentai, porn” shows that Philippines is the only country in the world which looks for more anime than porn (no, seriously: the data tells that).

[*] UPDATE: Mike informed me on IRC that the country of Philippines is populated by Filipino. Is he pulling my leg or what? Sounds just crazy enough to be true…

I went to check www.ipmce.su, and it’s still up, possibly still running on the SPARCstation that I installed back in 1995. “Last updated March 26, 1998″. What a facepalm.

UPDATE: Omo comments.

Contrary to what certain easily-excitable individuals [link: Sankaku] may proclaim, this is not a ban and this is not the end of the anime. But it will certainly pose a huge problem to the industry.

Make sure to read the update at the bottom, where he has to backtrack to “all in all, this issue seems to be worthy of protest and improvement but it is nowhere close to an end-game scenario for the industry []“.

DM goes on quite a ways about the issues in already-existing 18+ industry. This makes me think that I need to explore the field. My previous investigations demonstrated that whatever was lauded for stories (from Aoi Kana to Honeymoon Salad) was blatant pr0n nonetheless, with stories tacked on as a fig leaf. But with Tokyo government working to squeeze some of the content, it ought to overflow into the 18+ area despite the commercial disadvantage DM was talking about. Maybe I can find it.

Also, LOL:

It appears that the law is not as far-reaching as suggested by initial reports. Since homosexuality is perfectly legal in Japan, this means that yuri and yaoi are safe for now.