Woo baby we made it to Division Chief. For those that are unaware, this is the continuation of the Shima Kōsaku series after Section Chief Shima Kōsaku which we finished a couple months ago. Check out my introduction of the Shima Kōsaku series I wrote back when we started if you haven’t yet. You could consider this “Part 2” much like the parts in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. With a new part, the volume numbers start over at 1 and the chapters also start over at 1, but effectively this is volume 18 of the overall “Shima Kōsaku series”.
So now I gotta explain a little bit about how the series works once it gets to Division Chief.
Originally Shima Kōsaku was just a single one-shot comic about a subsection chief who was told he was about to be promoted as long as he kept his head down and didn’t get into trouble in the next month or so, and then uh, does. This then turned into a number of sequel one-shot stories that came out months apart, then finally it became a regular series that ran weekly in the Kōdansha magazine Weekly Morning.
Then Section Chief Shima Kōsaku ended at 17 volumes which I think was probably just going to be the end of the series. Originally it was a series about sort of a “regular guy” and as the series went on, Shima starts doing more and more impressive things and starts being involved in more and more important aspects of the company that affect more and more people. So the series ends right after he’s finally promoted to Division Chief after refusing being promoted a number of times. Section Chief Shima Kōsaku ended in early 1992. We always include the copyright pages that list which years and issues of the magazine each chapter was published in, as they more or less correspond to that same time in-story. And the character ages in real time.
So then we get to Division Chief. The Division Chief Shima Kōsaku series started out as not a regular series, but a bunch of one shots that were just called “Shima Kōsaku One-Shot Series” and this volume includes most of those. They were serialized irregularly and were sort of just “bonus chapters” of Section Chief at first rather than starting into long story arcs. Also because they were irregularly serialized, the year they were published was far apart. After Section Chief had been running weekly for years, so having around 45 chapters a year, now we were getting about one Division Chief chapter every 6 months or so on average as Hirokane-sensei was for the most part moving on to other series. Volume 1 here includes chapters that ran in the magazine from 1992, 1993, 1994, and 1995. The actual volume came out in mid-1995. As a result the chapters are called things like “Series (1) (Part 1)” rather than “Step #” like they were before, but this ends in the middle of volume 2 and they just start being called “Step #” again for the chapter number. A “series” is a single isolated story that ran 1-5 issues of the magazine in a row before a long break. Ultimately Division Chief starts to become more of a “normal series” in the middle of volume 2 when it started being regularly serialized every issue of Weekly Morning at the start of 1999. So the first two volumes kind of zoom through a bunch of years at once, just showing a couple little events each year or two, before it slowing down again to being weekly from 1999 onward (Later on it starts running every other issue as Hirokane-sensei is also working on his other series Tasogare Ryuuseigun at the same time).
Here’s a hiatus chart I made to give you a visualization of the whole thing.
I also made one of these charts of the prequels though I don’t plan on working on those for now.
So as you can see, we’re really still not all that far into the series overall despite having worked on it since September 2021. This is the equivalent of volume 18 of the overall series and the newest one out in Japan right now that came out a few weeks ago would be volume 86. Plus there’s also 21 seemingly-canon volumes of prequels which we could maybe work on at some point if we feel like it. Also there’s a bunch of non-canon spinoffs. So don’t expect us to get all the way to the end, let alone all the way to the end and also the prequels, as that would take uhhh a really long time. Even if we came out with one volume a month it would take around 6 years to do just the “main series”. I really need to properly balance my priorities of doing free fan projects as a hobby with the rest of my life. I’m doing all the translating, raw providing and usually nearly all of the typesetting and some cleaning on each of these. And they’re full of business jargon and real-life events and cultural references and all sorts of things on top of the usual needing to make the characters sound in-character and speech natural. So it’s a lot, don’t expect it to follow any sort of fixed schedule. I really love this series, it’s super-unique unlike anything else I’ve read and examines so many complicated aspects of life, whenever I work on it I want to do more, but it really takes a lot of time and energy. But I’m gonna keep working on Division Chief for now, which is a total of 13 volumes long.
Anyhow, enjoy. Everyone go tell all your (adult) friends about the series and get them to read it. Until next time.
Also, we have a new Discord! Come hang out and talk about manga. https://discord.gg/Nw45rfJYZF
Division Chief Shima Kо̄saku Volume 1 (Ch1-10)
Mega
Online Reader (Mangadex)
