Ok so here we are folks, we made it to the end of Part 3 of the Shima Kōsaku series. This took a little longer than a year, we finished Division Chief in March of 2025, so about a year and 4 months. I think that’s pretty good considering this series is pretty difficult and I’m juggling working on this with a bunch of other series. Mostly I’ve been trying to get the new versions of old Gintama volumes done for the last 8 months or so, which I still need to finish.
Since we’re done with another part I thought I’d do a little recap here.
So we’re now in 2005. As you can see all of the director arcs are way shorter and came out over way fewer years than the Section Chief/Division Chief arcs. And that’s because they’re just not as many volumes but also because there were lots of long hiatuses when Division Chief and Section Chief came out. Division Chief was essentially “bonus chapters” of Section Chief for a while and then started being a regular series in 1999. So at this point in the series we’re working on now, it’s coming out basically once a week, or maybe like 3 out of every 4 weeks which keeps going until the middle of the Chairman arc when it becomes every other week.
Currently in Japan now the series is in the Outside Director arc which, I dunno, maybe will be where it is until the series ends because Hirokane-sensei can’t write anymore (He’s said he’ll keep doing it as long as he can). The newest volume is Outside Director volume 8 which came out in May 2026 which is the 92nd volume of the main series, and also there’s 21 volumes of Young Shima Kōsaku prequels and 3 spinoff-y volumes drawn by Hirokane-sensei and also a bunch of other spinoffs he wasn’t involved with set in alternate universe and such. (For now I’m just going to stick to the main series, if we run out of main series I might try to work on the prequels but this series is long, folks. The first 2 Young Shima Kōsaku are out by the time Managing Director ends.)
Next up is Executive Managing Director Shima Kōsaku, which is pretty short, it’s only 6 volumes, totalling 66 chapters. Also starting in Executive Managing Director volume 1, every volume is roughly 185 pages rather than 225 or so. So now each volume has 11 16-page chapters in them generally speaking, and since every volume is shorter it should take less time to finish. So then maybe there’ll be less time between releases, though it really depends on how much free time I have to work on this (I’ve translated the first few chapters of Executive Director volume 1 already while this was being checked). Executive Managing Director has just 66 chapters, which is the third shortest one besides Senior Managing Director Shima Kōsaku which is 56 chapters and Senior Advisor Shima Kōsaku which is 60 chapters.
It’s pretty amazing that we’ve made it this far. We’ve released 38 volumes of this series now. My plan has basically been “keep going till I don’t feel like working on it anymore” and there’s a lot of exciting things coming up now that we made it all the way to Part 4. Part of the beauty of this series is it just feels like “life”. There’ll be one incident that feels like the most important thing ever and then that gets solved and you move on to something else. People come in and out of your life. You’ll meet someone and then maybe not see them again for years and you’ll eventually check in and learn what they’ve been up to. Lots of characters that have disappeared from the story come back in later and it feels like meeting an old friend. And now we’re enough years into the story where that happens a bunch. That’s on top of the story becoming more about economics and how industries work rather than an individual’s day-to-day work in their team with a few people. So there’s a lot of exciting stuff in this series to look forward to. Also a bunch of plotlines end in this volume and some more begin. From here, every new part is basically just “and the story keeps going”, it’s not such a major transition between parts and title changes. It’s like a few volumes = a year of Shima’s life, all while the world also changes in real time as we make our way through the 2000’s.
Ok so, besides that we’ll be working on Jojo soon. I’m gonna try to get the Gintama stuff done soon as well. See you later!
Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF
Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 8 (Ch94-107)
Mega
Online Reader (Cubari)
Online Reader (MangaDex)
Online Reader (Mangataro)
Online Reader (Mangadot)
