Category: Chitose

interlude – aeon food court

whbeebe

During the exercise I was bussed onto the post before sunup, and was bussed back to the hotel well after sundown. The best I could do was to try to make it to the Aeon food court before the food stores closed at around 8:30pm local time. This in spite of the fact that the stores said they stayed open until 9pm.

There were a number of stores in the food court: McDonalds,  Baskin-Robbins, Mr. Donut, Subway, an udon store, a raman store, and at least two sushi stores. I actually went into one of the stores with my traveling companion and watched him (and many others) enjoy eating raw fish. I declined, coward that I am.

All the stores were served by a common eating area. The food court had an interesting requirement, at least to Western eyes like mine. There were signs in the common area that asked you politely to clean up the table you were at when you finished eating. There were several wash cloth stations in the common area that supplied pre-moistened towels for this task. I tried to remember to clean my table after I finished.

I never saw anyone else do this, but the common eating area was always clean and neat, and I never saw staff from any of the food sellers come out and clean up. I got so used to seeing a clean eating area, even the common area, that on the way back home, at a layover in Denver, someone had left a large mess of spilled popcorn and orange soda on a table in another common eating area, and I was truly shocked to see it.

Of all the American-Japanese cross-cultural food stores, the Baskin-Robbins was the most interesting. Every item in the store had a definite Japanese touch to it, and there were many very Japanese ice cream items. Yet I still recognized ice cream cakes, many of them with American cultural emblems on them. Here are a few that should be instantly recognizable.

From top to bottom you should recognize Snoopy, Winnie the Pooh, and Sully and Mike from Monsters University. All of these are the tops of Baskin-Robbins ice cream birthday cakes.

The cultural mixing that has taken/is taking place is absolutely fascinating.

interlude – yama sakura 65

whbeebe

My trip to Chitose Japan was as technical support to Yamasakura-65 at Camp Higashi-Chitose, just across a local highway from New Chitose Airport. Camp Higashi-Chitose is part of the Northern Army of Japan, one of five active armies in Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force. Yamasakura-65 is an annual, bilateral exercise with the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF) and the U.S. military. This year it was coordinated from Chitose.

From 1 December to Wednesday, 11 December, I was on-site, 12 hours/day, the equivalent of the Maytag repairman for the JLCCTC constructive simulation. The Japanese and American army staffs were there to train at the brigade and higher levels, in a simulated major BLUFOR vs OPFOR wargame. Under these conditions it’s vital to keep the game going 24 hours a day for as long as the exercise is scheduled, as part of the simulation of war. Chitose wasn’t the only participant in the game; other groups from as far away as the US and Korea were also plugged in, providing support and simulating other aspects of warfighting. JLCCTC is about training for and studying major ground combat. For those who think that heavy ground combat is a thing of the past, all you have to do is look at the map of the eastern Pacific and see that Japan sits across from North Korea and China. Korea still thinks ground combat, and China has been building up their forces for quite some time. Considering China’s unilateral declairation of their Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea combined with the over-the-top craziness that is currently in charge in North Korea these days, YS-65 and similar training now had a certain “edge” to it.

How I got pulled into this is a long and complex story. The Reader’s Digest version: from 1998 to 2005 I helped design and write software for the core portions of JLCCTC, then went elsewhere until May of 2013 when I essentially came back. I came back to work as a contractor to Lockheed Martin, the prime for JLCCTC. Except this time I was on the “other side” of the wall, providing integration, test, installation, operations support, and training for the software system I helped to create all those years ago.

I much prefer my current position on the program, especially as it involves a lot of travel which I like. My children are grown now and I can go for two or more weeks at a time and not worry. Even long trips to Japan and beyond are no longer an issue. I just go where they tell me and use my experience and judgement along with my general instructions to do my job. And did I mention how I like to travel?

That lovely photo of me, taken by my traveling companion on my Galaxy S4, was snapped at the end of the exercise after they’d started to tear everything down for shipment back to Korea. If you’d like to see what it was like on the inside (and it’s kind of boring actually) there are official photos taken during the exercise (I wasn’t given official permission to use my camera on post during the exercise, but then I didn’t know enough to ask in advance).

Yama Sakura 65 I Corps on Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/icorps/sets/72157638301452783/with/11247253206/
DVIDS – http://www.dvidshub.net/video/311169/corps-and-japanese-ground-defense-force-begin-yama-sakura-65#.UsGCD7SGf7k