Well, to China we go.
Everyone we’ve made it to the big time. Our boy Shima is finally on the board of directors. And we’re finally into part 3 of the series! The third part of the series is 8 volumes long. The director arcs are all fairly short, relatively speaking (They’re not easy to translate I’ll tell you that). And after the first one, the Managing Director arc, the number of pages per volume goes down a little. They go from around 230 pages down to more like 185-190 pages. So when/if we get to that point, it should take a bit less time to do each volume and it stays like that for the rest of the series. But for now, we still have 7 more of these longer volumes to do. The three director arcs are all way shorter than the first two arcs. All of them combined is about the same length of the Section Chief arc in terms of pages. This is volume 31 in the whole series and the newest one that came out in Japan just now was volume 90. Not counting the prequels (21 volumes) and the side/extra volumes (3) and the spinoffs (Some other number). So, ya know, we’re moving right along. Don’t expect us to catch up any time soon/ever.

So this volume is a bit unique in that it’s more or less an epilogue of Division Chief. A few of the plot lines that were in Division Chief get their finale (At least until those character show up again, sometime in the future, many volumes from now, in some cases), and then it’s only in the last two chapters of this volume where Shima actually makes it to Shanghai. From there it starts a new arc with new characters. And we finally meet Kokubun! A character who’s a mainstay for the whole series up to the current ones still coming out. There’s also a bunch more discussion of suicide in this volume so be warned.

I mention this in a translation note but we’re writing the names of the Chinese characters with their Chinese spelling/pronunciation which is usually a bit different from how they’re pronounced in Japanese. This isn’t really much different to how you’d write a name pronounced in Japanese “Edowaado” as “Edward” in the translation, but I figured I’d mention it. So a character in Japanese that’s pronounced as “Ryū Ensei” would be written as “Liu Yangsheng”. Same with names of Chinese locations and such. They’re all based on the Mandarin pronunciation, specifically. This is pretty much the standard/obvious way to do it, but I figured I’d leave a bit of an explanation about it.

Also ya know I could never find ANY of the magazine covers or color pages for the chapters in this volume. It’s frustrating how hard those are to find. I’m only going so far as looking them up on the internet because the physical magazines from 20+ years ago are so hard to track down. Anyhow, yeah we’re still including the bunkoban covers and zenshuu covers. The cover designs change with the new part, too.

Ok well that’s all I can think of talking about. The next Jojo chapter comes out next week. Until then I guess I’ll be starting on volume 2 now. I hope you enjoy this, everyone!

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Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 1 (Ch1-13)
Mega
Online Reader (Mangadex)