Folks, we’ve made it. We are now done with the Division Chief arc of the Shima Kōsaku series. With this volume we’ve finished 30 total volumes in this series and finished everything that came out from when it started in 1983 to the beginning of 2002, so nearly 20 years of real-world time. And we’ve reached the point where Shima joins upper management as a member of the board of directors.

Here’s where we are on the big chart of this whole series.

I updated this a bit from last time to include the extra stuff like the “One Elegant Day” extra volume about Hirokane-sensei going to movies and restaurants with Shima and the New Century in Asia chapters and Charge Sheet chapters which aren’t regular numbered chapters. We’ve covered a lot of years but this is around 30 volumes out of 88 and the series is still going. Plus 21 volumes of prequels and also there’s some spinoffs. So who knows if we ever catch all the way up, if we do it’ll take a while. I’m not planning to just marathon through the series just to do allll those volumes, I’m just gonna go with the flow and keep going with this series so long as it’s still enjoyable. I hope you all keep it up with me and the rest of our team here at HWMN through that time. We’ve been working on this since August 2021 so it’s been quite a journey so far, nearly 4 years to get to this point.

Aaanyhow, this volume concludes the Division Chief arc. This is the end of a lot of story arcs but plenty of them keep going into the next volume. As usual I’m gonna try not to spoil it but there’s lots of emotional and exciting things going on in this volume as well as a bunch of new plot lines getting started. Next volume is Managing Director Shima Kōsaku volume 1, which largely functions as an epilogue of the Division Chief series and then the last 2 chapters really get into the new arc that starts with Shima in charge of Hatsushiba’s branch in China. There are three “director arcs” which are all fairly short. Managing Director is 8 volumes, Executive Director is 6 volumes, and Senior Director is 5 volumes. So all three of them together are 19 volumes. Then after that is the President arc, the Chairman arc, the Senior Advisor arc, and then the current one that’s still coming out, the Outside Director arc. Also the number of pages per volume goes down after the Managing Director arc by 20-40 pages so we may be able to get through them a bit faster. But we’ll see how things go. I’ve had a lot of IRL problems lately so I can’t spend a ton of time on manga. But we’ll see how it goes! I’m already starting work on the Managing Director arc which I’m sure you’ll all enjoy if you’ve stuck with the series this far. Please let more folks know about this series, I hope more people discover it as we keep going. It’s really great and I love seeing people’s reactions to it. I don’t think there’s any other series out there quite like it.

Also, we have a Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF

Division Chief Shima Kо̄saku Volume 13 (Ch138-150)
Mega
Online Reader (Mangadex)