Anime Book Club: Kino’s Journey ~The Beautiful World~ Week #2

Good morning, all. I’m trying to get this out a bit early today since I’ll be out of the house for a while on Sunday afternoon. I would also like any newcomers to know that posts for previous weeks will be open indefinitely; even if you’re starting late (or seeing this post several weeks or months after the fact), I’d love to hear your thoughts on the episodes and I see every comment that gets posted, so it won’t be overlooked. Additionally, I did a few tweaks on the back end of the site which should make it a little easier to post comments and subscribe to comment threads, so you can get notified when someone replies. There’s also a way you can subscribe to the site itself and be notified when new posts go up; there’s a spot to enter your email on the right sidebar (just below the calendar). I’ve tested it out and it works.

This week we’ll be covering episodes 3 and 4 of the series. I felt that the two episodes last week worked out to be a pretty good pair, with a sort of a shared theme being “why do people kill others?” This week, if I’m remembering properly from my earlier viewing, there’s also a kind of similarity between the two episodes, but I’ll save that for the discussion.

Previous Weekly Discussions:

Week 1 – Episodes 1 and 2

Episode 3 – Bothersome Country – Crunchyroll – Hulu – Funimation

Content Warning: Use of military weaponry.

Kino encounters a setback while traveling which doesn’t present an immediate solution, so decides to sleep on it until they come up with some way to address it. While Kino is napping, Hermes feels the ground begin to rumble. They first suspect an earthquake, but the source of the shaking turns out to be something much less natural – it’s a huge country on wheels, traveling across the land on an unstoppable, never-ending journey.

Kino hails the country and they seem very welcoming. They’re met at ground level by a diplomat, who then accompanies them above and gives them a tour. The country is very clean and modern, and runs on caterpillar tracks that are almost always in motion (if they stop for too long, the giant generator that powers the country will overheat and explode). There are cameras hovering outside the metal borders that send back images of what’s going on outside. The top floor is a beautiful park – the one place where the sun shines and people can enjoy the natural light. The children about to graduate from primary school are even painting a striking mural on the outside wall of the country, depicting the most memorable sight they witnessed during their days in school. Kino is impressed by the place’s modernity and the many creature comforts (like clean sheets and hot water – very important to a traveler who’s used to drinking from dirty streams and rarely getting to bathe). The place seems like a dream.

It’s a few days into Kino’s stay when the host country encounters an obstacle – another country whose border wall spans the area between two mountains. This country is understandably unhappy about potentially having their assets (infrastructure and agricultural fields) crushed beneath the wheels of a giant vehicle, and once negotiations go sour (almost immediately), they open fire. While the missiles don’t have much of an effect on the strong outer walls of the moving country, they do begin to mark up the children’s mural. Kino volunteers to take out the missile tracking system in order to prevent any further damage, and is hailed as a hero when their shots deftly hit their targets (with no loss of human life in the process). After the ordeal is over, Kino continues traveling, having used their time aboard the moving country to avoid their earlier setback.

  

Episode 4 – Ship Country – Crunchyroll – Hulu – Funimation

Content Warning: non-lethal gun violence and a stabbing injury.

Shizu and Riku continue to look for a permanent place to settle. At the shore, they encounter a giant ship whose population is there to trade for supplies. This famous “ship country” is as mysterious as it is huge, and this piques Shizu’s interest. He and Riku board the ship to both gain passage to the Western continent and to see what, if anything, its cloaked figures are hiding.

Once aboard, Shizu is given a choice by the country’s leaders: either join them and serve as an overseer to the workers living in the ship’s belly, or join those workers in their labor and living conditions. Shizu chooses the latter. The people living in the ship’s internals seem perfectly kind and welcoming to the traveler in their midst. They provide Shizu with a guide, a very quiet girl named Tifana or “Ti” for short. Ti doesn’t say much, but she does show Shizu around the ship, including some abandoned areas in disrepair. Shizu becomes concerned because there are so many seemly essential areas of the ship that are falling apart, flooded, or otherwise inaccessible and it’s soon clear that the country won’t be afloat for much longer unless something is done to address the maintenance situation. The working population (who as Shizu begins to notice, don’t actually seem to be doing much or have anything to do in the first place) seems unconcerned, and claims that the overseers will take care of them. Shizu decides to discuss the issue directly with the leadership.

The overseers are specifically uninterested in talking the matter over, and send one of their members to silence Shizu. That individual turns out to be Kino, who also boarded the ship some time ago and chose to aid the overseers when given the initial option. When Shizu explains the situation with the ship he then invites Kino to join him in his quest to get the overseers to see reason. When they arrive atop the leaders’ tower, however, the situation becomes even stranger. The overseers ask Shizu whether his concern over the populace indicates that he plans to become their king. When he answers somewhat in the affirmative, the overseers collapse into nothingness before their eyes. Shizu brings the ship ashore and sets the people free, but instead they become angry and return to the ship’s underbelly. They’ve never known life outside the ship, the land doesn’t have the comforting tremors that they’re used to, and who does Shizu think he is, anyway? As they’re leaving and the doors are closing, Ti remains. She was an outsider to begin with, abandoned by her parents and shunned by the other humans on the ship. The overseers, really a complex AI system, raised her. Now they’re abandoning her, just as she was abandoned by her blood family. It’s only after a tense few moments that Shizu invites Ti to join Riku and himself on their travels. Kino leaves, perhaps to meet them again someday after Shizu finds a permanent settlement.

   

 

Discussion Thoughts and Questions (feel free to share additional ones in the comments!)

I mentioned in the opening of the post that I felt that these episodes, much like last week’s episodes, had some similarities that made them a surprisingly good pair. Last week we talked a lot about the morals, ethics, and rules-lawyering related to how the act of killing is seen and portrayed in the different countries and stories depicted in episodes 1 and 2. This time the initial similarities between the two episodes is more visual and physical – they both involve countries that are constantly on the move and the unique issues and problems that occur as a result of this. As one would expect, though, both takes provide some unique insight into the types of consequences that occur as the result of such a massive conglomeration of parts and people being anything but stationary.

Episode 3 is interesting to me because of how conflicted I was by the end. The citizens and leadership of the moving country all seem very nonchalant about the inevitable destruction involved in their constant travels. The diplomat expresses some minor sadness about the huge tracks they leave in their wake (“Anyone who travels leaves their mark behind”), but since the consequence of their not moving is their inevitable destruction from their overheating generator, it appears that any other ethical dilemmas resulting from their continued movement are outweighed by their duty to survive. This is all well and good until they literally trample over another country’s agricultural fields to make their forward progress. The walled country is nominally given a choice – either get out of the way willingly, or by force – but is this really a choice? On the other hand, the walled country seems like it’s populated by grade-a jerks – it’s not because they start shooting off missiles at the moving country, because that to me seems like a typical, expected response. As we learn at the end of the episode, however, they tried to extort Kino when Kino attempted to pass into their country, by attempting to take one of Kino’s weapons as a “toll.” It sounds as though the wall they put in place was explicitly to facilitate the strong-arming of people attempting to pass through, so perhaps the world would be better off if that country had a hole bored through said wall.

1. My first question is related to that line of thinking – what are your thoughts on the justification either side has to their position (moving forward to ensure the survival of their country and citizens, versus the right to build a wall and collect (perhaps unreasonable) tolls on others)? It’s stated in the episode that every country (much like every person) causes some degree of bother or inconvenience to others simply by existing. Do you think that this is enough justification for what transpires?
2. Throughout the episode, the term 迷惑 (meiwaku – trouble, annoyance, bothersome) is used repeatedly. It’s a concept that’s culturally important to Japanese people – they don’t want to be a source of “meiwaku” to others. Do you think that this term and concept adequately indicates the degree to which each country is affected by one-another?
3. It seems to me that there might be other solutions for the traveling country’s issue of their overheating generator; that its overheating could be addressed in some other way, if they decided to expend some resources studying it (they’re clearly technologically advanced enough to do so). How do you interpret the fact that they’ve chosen to let it be?
4. I found myself interpreting this episode (as well as episode 4) in terms of things that countries do and have done in “real life.” While there hasn’t yet been a case where a country has physically driven over a neighboring country (that I know of), there are almost countless cases of countries having invaded others, imposing their will and leaving much more than footsteps behind. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Episode 4 was compelling to me not so much due to the makeup of its moving country, but more so for the consequences to its bottle civilization which after many generations eventually came to the surface. Like the moving country from episode 3, there are clearly some issues that could have been addressed at some earlier time that would have allowed the ship to remain functional and the populace to have a greater concept of the outside world and their potential opportunities to exist elsewhere than beneath the ship. The AI may have avoided simply becoming overseers and chosen instead to educate the children further on the ships functions, ensuring that generations to come could maintain the vehicle and prevent it from deteriorating. The AI could have explained the existence of the outside world and allowed more freedom. But of course, perhaps as an effect of the AI not being human itself, this didn’t happen and the two groups settled into an easy, though eventually self-destructive, relationship. Looking at how things ended up in the episode, it’s almost as if Shizu was a virus, disrupting the balance of the relationship and altering the makeup of the ship’s “body” going forward.

I don’t have as many structured questions related to this episode in particular (though I would love to hear people’s general thoughts about the episodes as well – please don’t feel obligated to stick to a “script” if you have any personal responses to share), but I did have a couple of thoughts:

1. Much like in episode 3, I found myself relating this country’s situation to real-life ways in which countries haven’t done right by their own existences. Specifically, I was struck by the concept that the “broken parts” of the ship have been left in place to deteriorate rather than anyone taking the initiative to replacing them. I think this is a powerful concept that relates very closely to some of the things my country (USA) has approached some of its many social issues. What are your thoughts?
2. More than once, a character (in at least one case it’s Riku, the very wise talking dog), refers to the ship country as “this country, or rather this ship…” I personally found it odd because it’s both a ship and a country, but do you find any particular significance in the fact that they corrected themselves in this way?
3. Shizu unfortunately finds out that, while making a change he thought would be positive for the ship country’s people, he acted without knowing the entire truth of the matter. I find this to be a very telling realization especially since I feel this is something which occurs in relations between actual countries. It begs the question – while it is natural to want to correct injustices as we see them, what can or should be done (if anything), if the people being affected by injustice don’t see it as such?

I didn’t get much into Kino’s specific motivations this week, but I feel that there are at least some things that happen in episode 3 that might make it interesting to explore that a little further, so feel free to discuss that as well. This series continues to fascinate me, especially when doing these deep-dives. I hope everyone else is having a fulfilling watch-along so far, too!