Home Security, for a price...

After the recent burglary that our little neighborhood experienced a few months ago (see here) and a rush among many of our neighbors to start using the services of one of the many home security companies here in Japan, we started to feel the pressure to do the same ourselves.

Not that I personally felt overly worried, but Mrs. Sunshine thought the whole thing was a bit scary and being one of the few houses without any form of security services would increase the risk our house ending up as a burglary target.

The two main players here in Japan are the market leader SECOM followed by Alsok (hey, I think at least, this is not backed by any statistics!) with some minor players like CSP. As the shrewd businessman that I am, I am very careful in picking which company to use and the main tool I use to determine this is through watching the commercials that they show on TV.

First, let's take a look at the runner-up, Alsok and their commercial featuring the olympic medal winner female wrestler whose name escapes me at the moment. This is probably the first time that she actually has worn make-up!

Then, we can see the commercial from SECOM. This one is a bit older though, the more recent ones feature the boy band SMAP:er Kimura Takuya (whom neighborhood blogger Corrinne's sister in law has very strong feelings about), but the newer ones are a bit harder to understand if you don't know Japanese so I think this one is representable enough.

As you can probably understand, the decision was easy and we went with SECOM. After a visit from their lady "Advisor" (read: sales rep, whom shockingly enough was one of the first people ever that Baby Sunshine didn't scream out in terror when first meeting her, not sure if that's good or bad though...). We basically went with their full plan, which without having electrified floor or hidden laser turrets, still felt pretty hi-tech and was asked as to whether we wanted to purchase the system or rent it. Purchasing the system would have amounted to a hefty 350,000 JPY (~$3,500 something) and I briefly managed to through the lady rep off guard when I told her that if we would purchase it, it would be among the most expensive things that we have in our house and that I would be afraid that the thieves would steal it.

We sealed the deal and one week later they would come over and install all the hi-tech equipment and we were told that they were extremely busy, so there would likely only be one person doing the job. Come the next weekend and four people from SECOM show up at our base of operations, later on joined by a security guard who came in without knocking (ok, the front door was open and a lot of stuff was moved in and out) casually hung out in our living room for a little while, telling one of his colleagues that was there that he came over because "I had nothing better to do and thought I could hang out here". I think someone had words with him because five minutes later he was gone as silently as he had joined the party.

But all in all, we're happy with the security now and even installed a lock on the inside of our bedroom door that probably would withstand a medium size dwarf going at it for a few minutes before breaking down (Mrs. Sunshine wanted it for security while I thought more of the convenience of stopping Baby Sunshine from wandering in at ... ... ... inconvenient times when she's a bit older). Perhaps a break-in to our house could be featured in the next Mission: Impossible movie?