Management: This post is Part 3 of a cour-long project consisting of mental notes, observations, and musings of every episode of Kino’s Journey (2017). I will endeavor in this feature to avoid making any comments about the show’s technical aspects, but I may end up comparing it to previous episodes of Kino’s Journey (2003) when the story ground the former covers begins to overlap with what the latter has already explored.
Notes on Episode 3: Bothersome Country
Management: This country was not covered by Kino’s Journey (2003).
Undecided about what to do (and presumably where to travel) next, Kino and Hermes are given their answer something like a fortress emerges into their view. Thinking that it’s a country, Kino decides to check it out. Noticing her down below and confirming that she’s a traveler, the man in charge of admitting travelers and migrants invites her into what is, in fact, his country. It is a country on moving treads. She accepts his invitation and says she’ll stay for 5 to 10 days. He states to her that, like his other countrymen, he juggles multiple jobs. For example, he serves as an immigration officer, the chief diplomat, and a tour guide.
His country is one that’s heavily modernized and technologically advanced. It bears visual similarities with the technological levels of today’s first world countries (sans the gigantic death laser later brought up), but the anachronistic nature of the show makes his society’s technological levels stand out all the more. The enormous amounts of energy used to power his mobile society comes from a reactor that requires the country to be constantly on the move to prevent it from overheating. That need complements a certain lifestyle that his country’s people have adopted: traveling with their entire country in tow. The moving country travels from one land to another. Drones take pictures of the surrounding vistas and project them onto the country’s interior surfaces for its citizens to enjoy. Graduating primary school classes in this country practice a unique send-off project: they paint a mural of their favorite vistas on their moving country’s exterior surface.