27 August 2007 - 7:40pm
Kino's Journey
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Episode after episode Kino is a heroine. At no point in this anime is she written to endure sexism. Many men whom she meets in her journey believe that they can assert their dominance on her and quickly find out they cannot. The women that Kino met during her journey were strong and independent women. One of characters invents an airplane in the world Kino lives in. This female engineer does not allow her fiance or any other male with political authority to stop her goal ... to fly. The women in Kino's Journey were, for the most part, not designated to gender roles established my patriarchy. Quite the contrary, the writer Keiichi Sigsawa, wrote a avant-garde seinen anime. The writer provided a television show that challenged gender roles and oppression in society.
The glorification of violence in this anime is a long time established patriarchal value, but because the focus was on a heroine, the reason behind the violence is questionable:
The use of violence and whether or not it can be justified is a recurring theme in Kino's Journey, from whether animals should be killed in order to sustain the life of others to whether an entire population should be destroyed in order to save two other civilizations. [link]
One might be able to categorize this anime as josei.
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Comments
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This show was not about feminism.
Spoilers
Kino takes her name from the man who is killed with the name and becomes so androgynous it's a running mystery until late in the show if the new Kino is actually a man or woman. If you define feminist friendly as destroying the genders then yeah Kino would be that if that's all you want out of it.
Kino's travels is more in line with gulliver's travels than a poke at the 'patriarchal power structure'. It includes, but not limited to child like views of paradoxes of the world. There are women both strong and weak, free and slaves, independant and subserviant in the show. It was more objectivist or zen like rather than trying to apply any sort of double plus good words that can be found.
Characters also wanted to serve Kino as a functioning family and were denied afterwhich they commit suicide. Although I wonder if that isn't part of the appeal of the feminist friendly label. Others were going to dominate Kino regardless of gender because they were tyrants to their people, slavers, or a desperate people looking to kill for revenge. The characters were equal opportunity in their dispensing of cruelty to both men and women alike.
So one wonders how you can make the leap of logic required to say she endures sexism. It is never explicit or implied about sexism to Kino. That must be quite some leap since they don't even reference her gender until a flashback at almost the end of the series. So please put the hammer down.
I have the english DVD that I checked out and on the special features page, the background song is nice, its not the opening/ending song. I think i've also heard it a few times during the show. Is it an actual song?
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