Kosaku Shima

Kosaku Shima (Japanese: 島耕作, Hepburn: Shima Kōsaku) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Kenshi Hirokane. It depicts the growth and career of a fictional salaryman named Kōsaku Shima. It has been serialized in Kodansha’s Morning, starting with the first series Kachō Shima Kōsaku in 1983 and has currently been divided into eight parts. The current part, Sōdanyaku Shima Kōsaku, began in 2019.

The manga has also been published as 7 bilingual volumes (Japanese-English) called Division Chief Kosaku Shima and President Kosaku Shima, and in French and German. In addition to various manga there has also been one comedic ONA, and two comedic anime adaptations lasting 11 episodes each, a live action film, and a single episode TV drama. The character also acts as the “host” or framing device for a business documentary series on NHK World, Shima Kosaku’s Asian Entrepreneurs.

As of 2013, the series had over 40 million copies in circulation. In 1991, the manga won the 15th Kodansha Manga Award in the General category.

At the start of the long-running series, Shima Kōsaku is a kachō, or section chief, of a huge conglomerate, Hatsushiba Electric. He is later promoted to buchō (division chief) and eventually promoted to manager and executive-director, and with each promotion the title of the series changed as well. He was promoted to the president of Hatsushiba Electric, and the title changed to “Shachō” Shima Kōsaku, which means “President Kōsaku Shima”. The fictional conglomerate is modeled after Panasonic, or Matsushita Electric, where Hirokane worked before and is highly accurate in its portrayal of Japanese corporate culture.