Founding Secom — from patrol guards to Japan’s first online security (1962)

A company that created not a product but a trade

What this founding shows is not a fight over existing demand but the choice to bring into being a trade — private security — that did not yet exist in Japan. Under the prevailing belief that safety was free, first-year sales stayed small, and it took the national stage of guarding the Tokyo Olympics before paid private security won any social recognition at all. The judgement of two young men who bet on an untapped demand for safety, in a business that could be paid in advance, is what made security viable as a service sold for money.

The second thing visible here is how the weight was shifted from human guarding to machines. Even when orders flooded in after the Olympics, a structure in which payroll swelled with every additional guard could not meet the demand, and Iida moved the centre of the business to sensors, telephone lines and a central monitoring station. Choosing to stay with electronic security through the criticism that followed the Fuchu ¥300 million robbery was, read another way, a bet on a revenue structure that did not depend on people. Within little more than a decade, a five-person company in Shibuya had become an electronic-security firm with alarm bases across the country.