Kengo Okumara leaned back in his chair. He'd just done the manual checks of a subsection of the target map for the surveilence balloons.
It was odd. He checked this file every month, with barely any changes in it as long as he'd had the job. Sometimes a big data centre or power station came online, which changed a cell's priority number, but that was maybe twice a year. But you'd think that he'd sometimes see photos that came back. Pretty weird to be planning surveilence over Eastern Europe for the Japanese Self Defence Forces. Wasn't like Belarus had any designs for invasion.
It was really cool that they had the high altitude balloons though, the highest ever made, unless another country had them too. They would be really hard to detect, even if you knew they were there. In fact, they wouldn't even know themselves where they were. They just floated along in the sky, nearly invisibly, and downlinked only when they came over the right places, all Japanese bases. It was very slow, but reliable and incredibly high resolution. Numberplates had been read with it on test runs.