So I’m back, and no longer all whacked out from the time shift, and being sick, and jetlag, and being sick… sensing a theme? Yama Sakura 63 went well, with varying levels of learning occurring across both the Japanese and U.S. participant groups. After 12 days and something on the order of 1000 photos, I have to somehow break that up into digestible chunks, or I won’t be able to write about it, much less anyone being able to read it all. Thus, since we were there for a Bilateral Command Post Exercise (CPX), and a major piece of that was interacting with our Japanese counterparts, I’ll start there, then cover the tour I went on (to the Tsunami site, to Zuihoden Temple, and to the site of Sendai Castle), and then finish up the 3rd post with the out-and-about stuff from Sendai city itself.
For starters, the exercise was scheduled such that each evening the day-shift guys were able to get together with their counterparts at the “Friendship Hall”. Based on contemporary Japanese culture, this means “get together and drink with your counterpart”… Yes, in Japan, social events most definitely involve alcohol:
There was also a lot of camaraderie and photo-taking going on:
There were also martial-arts demonstrations:
(prior to drinking, of course!)
I was one of the individuals tagged as an observer for the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) team that was working with the Japanese Center for Ground-Self-Defense-Force Lessons Learned (CGLL, pronounced “sea-gull”). The CGLL team is working with CALL to develop the same institutional memory for the GSDF that CALL is for the U.S. Army, and doing observations for a large-scale CPX were a good platform to teach some of that. Having been exposed to the great resource that CALL is when I was spinning up for my MITT deployment to Iraq, I was stoked, as I got to see the ‘echelons above reality’ bird’s-eye view of the exercise, from events happening on the Joint Operations Center (JOC) floor, to the White Cell (exercise control) meetings where player actions were considered and the exercise was redirected so as to hit all the training objectives. Overall, a very instructive experience.
With that, I got invited to a ‘kickoff dinner’ with the CGLL and CALL teams, so I slapped the ‘nifty-fifty’ on my dSLR and away we went. Still on-post, we got to visit the all-ranks club there at Camp Sendai:
This GSDF COL walked through after a rather loud party ended next door, which one of the interpreters pointed out as involving “a bunch of Airborne”… sounds about right:
At one point during dinner, the CALL team chief was in the middle of a discussion about Judo, which led to some impromptu position demonstrations:
And of course, there was sake. COL Masuda, the CGLL Chief was a very gracious host:
The trick about drinking with the Japanese, is to learn what the signal for “I’m done” is: Leave your glass full. While in the U.S. this would most likely be considered a ‘party foul’ as you’re wasting the last glass-worth of alcohol, in Japan if your glass is low or empty it is incumbent upon one of your table neighbors to refill it. So, when you’ve had enough, simply leave the glass full and you’re essentially saying: “Thank you, I cannot possibly drink any more”. Knowing we would most likely head from this party back over to the Friendship Hall, I thought discretion the better part of valor and bowed out on the sake pretty early. Along with COL Masuda, the Japanese team had a large contingent of LTCs, and one very outspoken Sergeant Major:
(Note: The rank worn by their CSM-equivalents is the same as was listed on our cheat-sheet as those for Warrant Officers, a single horizontal bar)
Like I had suspected, after dinner (which was AWESOME, btw. Sashimi, cooked pork, some insane traditional japanese cold-weather soup… lots of good stuff there), we all hoofed it back to the Friendship Hall and the evening continued:
Over the course of the week, we worked with our counterparts as we conducted collections; i.e. went around and wrote down observations of what was happening in each section according to the questions provided by the CALL reps, NOT collections in the U.S. Intelligence doctrinal sense… :P. What that basically consisted of was having them shadow us as we went around and asked the questions of the appropriate SMEs in each section (Fires, Intel, Ops, etc), which caused a bit of an ‘Aha!” moment for the CGLL crew. Gleaning lessons learned from an exercise is done by collecting information, and it’s not that I had the information, it was that I knew who to talk to, and how to ask the questions to get relevant answers that was the core of ‘collection’. Not much of a stretch, but then again the U.S. Army has been doing this for over 20 years, so there’s some institutionalization of the concept that hasn’t happened with the GSDF yet.
Miho, one of the Ministry of Defense civilians working with CGLL was my shadow for most of the first day of collections, and by the end we’d figured out that she was also working with their Public Affairs section, since pretty much every time I started talking to one of the U.S. bubbas, this would occur:
Of course every night the Friendship Hall activities continued. I think I did a pretty good job of pacing myself, and managed to make it through without overly abusing my liver. Even the 25ID LNO team made it out on occasion:
Patch trading, paper ninja-star folding, and miniature origami all happened at one point or another:
And then this guy showed up:
(apparently it was one of the Japanese COLs in the suit)
Of course for every opening party, there has to be a corresponding close-out, which for us meant an excursion to an off-post restaurant with traditional tatami mat seating. I had (of course) prepped the camera and was shooting stuff out the window of the bus when I noticed a very interesting restaurant sign:
Just as I managed to snap that shot, we turned into the parking lot for the same restaurant. Pretty cool place. The tables had integrated cooking grills, allowing diners to cook their own meats and vegetables:
Each of the 4 Americans from the observers team was split out to one of the 4 tables in the room, which was very cool. My table had two Japanese CPTs who had attended U.S. Captain’s Career Courses (one at Benning, and the other at the Marine CPT course), both of whom spoke English very well. The TRADOC LNO from Tokyo (CALL is organized under TRADOC) was there, and got seated with COL Masuda:
The guys at my table:
Chief Taum:
(Note the legless chair Chief is sitting on… Thankfully they were offered to all us gaijin, as my knees couldn’t take sitting cross-legged for that long.)
And CPT Hill:
And since he speaks Japanese, the TRADOC rep got to be his own interpreter for the end-of-dinner toasts:
It was a good evening, and both the CALL and CGLL teams were great folks to work with.
Stay tuned for Episodes 2 and 3, where I wander around a desolate wasteland and ancient temple, and then move to a bustling metropolis… Hopefully there will be no badly written attempts to find Sith lords, previous photos to the contrary.
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