The war on fan-service continues. This time MiKandi Japan’s White Secret Kickstarter known as the Linda Project was suspended by the crowdfunding service following targeted mass reports.

The news about the suspension came via a tweet on May 16th, 2019 from the MiKandi Japan Twitter account, who noted that Kickstarter suspended their campaign just days into crowdfunding following mass reports either led by a rival company or encouraged by an individual.

#Kickstarter SUSPENDED our campaign w/ legendary Japanese artist @lindacomic & project creator @pushpublication! Mass reporting lead by a rival company or encouraged by an individual is suspected. 💥Official statement here: https://t.co/WNKtVDxlDj pic.twitter.com/hiPyV3qE11 — MiKandi Japan (@MiKandiJapan) May 16, 2019

The Kickstarter page notes that they had garnered $24,622 out of a $40,000 goal just shortly after opening up the campaign. It was then suspended on May 15th, 2019 for “inappropriate content”.

They go more into detail about the project and the suspension in an update on the White Secret page detailing the collaboration with renown Japanese hentai artist LINDA and the Push! Publication to have the infamous doujins translated into English, along with funding a brand new doujin.

Most people would instantly fall back to the excuse that Kickstarter probably never allowed the project on their platform in the first place and that they were violating the rules. Well, that would be an incorrect assessment of the situation because MiKandi states that the project was manually approved by the Kickstarter and given the green light, writing…

“As you may know by now, our Kickstarter project has been suspended due to “inappropriate content” as termed by Kickstarter. This is despite the fact that the project was manually approved by the Kickstarter team. As we are unsure of what is going on at the moment, we suspect that our project was subjected to mass reporting lead by either a rival company or encouraged by a certain individual, even though there’s plenty of adult content out there, they specifically targeted ours.”

This is actually not uncommon.

We’ve seen some crowdfunding projects coming under fire, usually if they’re from companies that are against political correctness. For instance, the Rebel Yell comic had its IndieGoGo campaign terminated for violating the terms of service, but when reached for comment IndieGoGo was unwilling to say how the comic violated their terms of service.

MiKandi is in the exact same position. When they attempted to find out how the campaign became inappropriate after it was initially approved, Kickstarter refused to explain to them how the campaign violated their terms, saying…

“This is the second time a PUSH! Publication project was suspended due to reasons that Kickstarter has refused to give us specifically. As we believe this decision is unfair, we are currently asking Kickstarter for more clarification on the matter. “We have informed the artist, LINDA, to let him know about the current situation. As you can imagine, he is extremely disappointed over this. And now we have another perfect example of why Japanese artists are so weary to release their work outside of Japan. Unclear rules. Approval, then disapproval. No clear explanations.”

This is true.

There has been a rapid escalation censorship in recent times, from Sony’s censorship policies, to Valve’s unclear rules that lead to many Japanese games getting banned on Steam, to the crackdown on certain kinds of content on social media, to a push to censor fan-service in a lot of Japanese entertainment, it’s basically been a cultural war against sexy-time.

For now MiKandi and Push! Publication are encouraging backers to follow them via the e-mail newsletter to keep abreast of their efforts to bring translated versions of LINDA’s work overseas.

You can sign-up for the newsletter by visiting the official MiKandai Japan website. Alternatively, you can still purchase LINDA’s books through Nihonbungeisho.co.jp web portal.

(Thanks for the news tip Doraggon)