Sayonara Hayama House

Today we bade final farewell to our beautiful home in Hayama, a mere 1.5k from the Emperor's Summer home.

In the last 2 weeks we have only spent mere daylight hours there and today was the day for the final paperwork and key turn in to relinquish possession of the house.

Now I know that virtually none of you had any idea or inclination that we would be doing so, so this is probably coming as a shock to you.

One month ago, we came home from an afternoon hike and found that someone had been in our yard and had opened a shed which they forgot to close when they left. This of course triggered my 'detectoring' instincts and I began to pay much more attention to the positions of gates and the like.

Over the next 2 weeks, on a number of occasions I would wake up in the morning and notice that the gates were open when they'd been closed when we went to bed. Then one morning after a particularly stormy night, I went to open the shutters of DD's bedroom and found muddy footprints on the low roof just below her window (Thank God for storm shutters!). The Police came out, along with CSI and collected evidence, though they didn't have much to go on that was substantial.

We got motion detector alarms from the base and put them up over that low roof and on one side of the house, only to have the one on the low roof set off twice that very night and the one in the side yard set off the next night. During all of these attempts to gain entrance to our home, there were a few nights that the car was left unlocked with things in it and nothing was ever stolen.

Our Housing Agent solicited the neighborhood for possible witnesses and some one mentioned seeing a white van (licence plate #***) parked just down the block on the night of the roof alarm being set off, and no one around knew anyone who owned the vehicle. Also, no one else had been having any problems with potential intruders and as far as the police knew, no one in that neighborhood ever had...

We are not really allowed to own guns here (You can but the process is incredibly lengthy), so we had armed ourselves with what we could and really weren't getting any sleep. After an evening at a friend's house, we came home and found the suspicious van parked just around the corner from our house, right where they could easily see us come and go and know when we turned out our bedroom light. We snapped a picture and tried to look into the van (probably not the smartest move), but couldn't get a good view in, since they had shirts hung up to cover all the side windows. I called the police, and no one there spoke English, so I hung up and DH decided to take the first watch while I slept. The van sat there about half the night and then left.

The next day we talked to the housing agent who came buy to install some barbed wire and plan for some motion sensor lighting and told him about the repeated presence of the van and he took a print out of the picture we got and took it to the police. We also told our friend who's house we'd been at and were invited to stay at his place until we figured out what we wanted to do.

We quickly packed some bags and headed to CT's house for the night, which turned out to be a particularly stormy night, perfect for our intruder, as they always seemed to try on the stormy nights, since the wind tends to make lots of noise and the neighbors are less likely to hear. The next day we went back half expecting to have our house broken into since the weather had been perfect and we were obviously not home to impede the taking of our things. To our surprise and deeper concern, nothing looked even touched, which to me, confirmed my fear that the only thing they wanted in our home was only there when we were, which was us, or more particularly, one of us. Kidnapping is not common here, but not unheard of, particularly of adorable little girls that could grow up to be pretty big girls (Thailand and the world's largest prostitution population, isn't so far away). Besides, other homes in the neighborhood had much nicer things than we do and no bars on any windows and not even the wooden shutters, yet they were not experiencing anything like we were, and because of that, one of the housing agents told me that she could certainly understand my fears that the intent was kidnapping.

That's when the plan solidified that we would do what ever it took and what ever it cost to move into safe housing, with our focus being on housing within the gates of the military base. Thankfully we have a great friend who let us stay with him while we worked through the details, and the base housing personnel were fantastic as they helped to fast track us into our new home.

For those of you who were wondering why my blog had disappeared, it was because, I figured that if perhaps the predator found the blog, they would be able to see the inner lay out of the house and I wanted it to be as much of a surprise to them as possible if I found myself having to hide around a corner with a Katana in the middle of the night.

Family and friends, please forgive us for not filling you in on this until now. We knew that God would provide and take care of us according to His will, and knew that those of you who pray, already have us in your prayers and didn't want you all to be worried and helpless to do anything for us 4,000 - 6,000 miles away.

To the only person we told, V, thank you for your great advice and level head on the issue!


For those of you planning to live in or visit Japan, please don't let this experience of our deter you, as we are the only people we've met here who have ever experienced anything like this. Japan is still one of the safest places in the world, just don't confuse 'safest' with 'crime free'. There is a reason that many homes have bars on the windows and locks on the doors, so use them... Don't live in fear though, just be aware and keep your eyes open. Japan is a wonderful place and many people are very helpful and very kind hearted. One of our neighbors came over while we were moving to express his deepest apology and shame that one of his countrymen (presumably) would be behaving in such a way.

All's well that ends well...