Hey everybody, here we are, finally, Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 6. Sorry it took so long, it’s been about 3 months since we finished the last one. Mainly that’s due to be focusing on trying to get this Gintama fix-up project done which has taken all of my time cause it’s like 4500 pages long. That’s almost done now, thank god, because it’s eaten up all my time since November.

So, this volume starts the Zeng Liesheng arc. Who’s quite a fascinating character. As the story goes on the scale has increased and the level of people Shima is dealing with keeps getting bigger and bigger and so some of the characters get larger and more extreme at times. There’s just 2 more volumes left in the Managing Director arc now, we’ve really made a lot of progress. Though the Executive and Senior Director arcs really feel like just sections of one long “Director Arc” to be honest. (It’s 8, 6, and 5 volumes for the three arcs. Though from Executive onward it goes down to 11 chapters per volume rather than 13)

I’d really like to get these out faster so I may focus on this for a while once the Gintama stuff is done. There’s about 3 volumes left to clean and redraw and then I’ll basically be focusing on translating the extras fro V46-59 and checking over the translations for mistakes I didn’t catch the first time. I wanna get that done because this redoing, fix-up project is kind of something you wanna just get out of the way and not something you wanna pause and go back to for a long time and I’ve been working on it actively since November. But whenever I get really into working on Shima I remember how much I love it and how fun it would be to get further along in the story.

In the meantime, we’re working on The JOJOLands volume 8. There’s no new 3-Gatsu no Lion announce yet. Uh, and the next The JOJOLands comes out on the 17th Japan time. We’ll probably get volume 59 of Gintama finished sometime soon as well. See ya later!

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

Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 6 (Ch66-79)
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Hey everyone we made it to Managing Director volume 5! This is probably the last release of the year, unless we finish the volume version of The JOJOLands volume 7 soon. Man I’ve done a lot of hours of working on this series this year. Most of this volume is a story arc about Chūfā CEO Sun Rui and Noriko.

With this, we’ve gotten 7 volumes of Shima done this year. Which I think is pretty good given that I spent a lot of the year balancing like 50 things and trying not to keep anything from dropping or falling apart. So I’m counting that as a win. As it stands we’ve got 3 more volumes of Managing Director and then 6 in Executive Managing Director and 5 in Senior Managing Director to finish the whole Director arc(s). We’ll see how much of that we can do next year, but as always I’m trying to make sure I don’t overdo it on this because I’m doing most of this project on my own and I need to save my energy for various other parts of my life sometimes. Also the volumes get shorter after Managing Director finishes, so each volume should go quicker. We really have gotten through a lot of it now, we’ve done 35 volumes of this series.

For the record, of the longer series we’ve done we’ve released:
45 volumes of Gintama (Plus the Koujien Fanbook stuff)
37 volumes of Toriko (Plus the original one-shot and some extras)
16 volumes of Innocent+Rouge
17 volumes of Kokou no Hito
16 volumes of Gash (Plus various bonus things)
13 wide-bans of Takeshi (Which is like 26-ish if it were regular volumes)
27 volumes of JoJolion + ~8 of The JOJOLands + 1 Rohan so about 36 volumes of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (Plus two novels which are quite long)
31.5 volumes of 81diver

So Shima is creeping up towards being one of the series we’ve released the most volumes for. Which I think is pretty impressive for a series with a ton of complicated economics and business jargon on half the pages. I was just thinking about that, given we’re releasing it pretty quickly all things considered. Though also some of those series I worked on more volumes of it but with another group, like I did all of Innocent and 81diver but those were done with Utopia Scans and a few other small groups. So it depends on what you want to count it. (Also the typesetting on Shima is really simple which helps, we usually typeset a whole volume within a few days).

Anyhow I’m thankful to folks who’ve stuck with this series, I really love it. I’m gonna keep going with it for now, we’ll see how far we get. I appreciate all the staff who I’ve worked with to get everything released this year that we have. If we don’t release anything else this year, I hope you all have happy holidays and a happy new year.

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

Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 5 (Ch53-65)
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And here we are at volume 4. Believe it or not we’re half way done with Managing Director now. This volume is mainly about the changing landscape of Japan’s business in China and how China is/was changing as a country as it develops over the course of the 2000’s. We’re into mid-2003 at this point in the story. Also there’s some sword fights and kissing. And it’s also the first appearance of Kōtarō! So lots of stuff going on in this one.

I really like how this series sort of gives you a snapshot of a specific era and what folks were thinking about the future at that point. You feel like you’re seeing what actual people thought at the time and their worries about the future and looking back on it 20 years after the fact now you can see how it played out. Various cultural dynamics changing too.

I finished like 4 chapters in a day in this volume for some of the easier ones in the middle and it makes me wonder sometimes if I should just try to marathon through this series rather than doing one volume every month or two. But given how long the series is, we still wouldn’t be caught up even if I did a chapter a day for two years. Outside Director volume 7 came out a couple weeks ago and that’s the equivalent of volume 90 of the series as a whole (not counting the prequels or the sorta-canon spinoffs) and this one we’re releasing now is the equivalent of volume 34. And there’s enough magazine chapters for 2 more volumes already and it’s still going. But I dunno I’m gonna play it by ear and just try to do this when I feel like it and maybe I’ll get a lot done. It’s a fun series to translate once you know what all the subject matter is and you’re not spending a whole bunch of time looking up business terms and such to make sure you’re interpreting it right. If I finished 4 chapters a day every day I’d get all the way caught up in about 4 months. Anyhow I’m probably not gonna do that, but it’s just something I’ve been thinking about since we’ve been working on this series for 4 years now. Also I finished the first few chapters of volume 5 while I was waiting for folks to cleand then check this volume, so hope fully that one won’t take too long from now.

Anyhow, Jojo comes out soon and I’m still scanning the rest of those Gintama volumes. There haven’t been any other 3-Gatsu no Lion chapters announced so far either. So anyhow see ya later!

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

Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 4 (Ch40-52)
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Hey folks, we’re finally done with Managing Director Shima volume 3! Lots of stuff going on in this one as the China arc continues. A fun thing about this one is there’s a lot of discussion about how China was a growing economy and developing fast when this came out in 2002 and 2003 and they were at the time speculating about where the country would be in 10-20 years. And that’s where we’re at now! So you can see how accurate their predictions were. Anyhow I sure hope you all like manga about economics because there’s plenty more where that came from in this series.

In the meantime, we’re working on 3-Gatsu no Lion volume 18 now. We’re in the process of re-cleaning and re-redrawing the whole volume’s worth of chapters. Plus making all the changes that were made for the volume and all that like we did for the previous ones. I’m hoping that doesn’t take too long. And there’s no The JOJOLands this month so the next thing I’ll probably do is start on Shima volume 4. And I’m still scanning Gintama volumes when I have time among everything else (I spent a ton of free time getting all our stuff uploaded to Cubari recently so I need to take some time to do other stuff). Anyhow, go tell all your friends Shima Kōsaku is the best manga ever and tell them to read it.

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

Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 3 (Ch27-39)
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Hey everybody, here we are. Managing Director Volume 2. It’s been about 2 and a half months since we finished the last one. Sorry it’s taken so long but the last couple months have been difficult in like 5 different ways and I haven’t had energy after work to work on these a lot. Also, as I’m sure you’ll see as you read it, the subject matter is pretty difficult and took a while to get right.

Several chapters in this volume are about the economic state of China relative to Japan and the West when this volume was published in 2002. I learned a lot working on this. They go into detail about how China was changing at the time and what working as a foreign company competing with domestic Chinese products and companies is like alongside being a joint company working in China and also competing against Chinese company as a Japanese company. It’s a lot, and it talks about both the macro and microeconomic areas. Also there’s a bunch of kung fu fighting in it. It’s fun to look back on this and see them talking about “where China will be in the nest 5-10 years or so” and realize you’re now 23 years on from when this was published so you can now go about finding out that answer if you so choose!

I’m looking forward to translating more, as this sort of thing happens all the time in this manga. Just sort of learning about a snapshot of the state of the world at a certain time.

In the meantime, I just go The JOJOLands volume 6 and I need to scan that and work on doing the volume version of those chapters. I’ve got like 15 more Gintama volumes to scan also and then we’re gonna start trying to finish volume 70 and work backwards and see how far we get. And there’s uhhhh 6 volumes left in Managing Director! So we’ll be working on more of that. Probably for a while. Until next time, everyone!

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

Managing Director Shima Kōsaku Volume 2 (Ch14-26)
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