I'm finally running on NetBSD binaries, and now I'm having an annoying
   problem in that it doesn't seem to know what time zone it's in, even
   though it's compiled into the kernel.   Is there something obvious
   that I need to configure and am just not finding in the man pages?

You should compile the kernel to use GMT, and then make a symlink from
/etc/localtime to the appropriate file in /usr/share/zoneinfo.