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7 Conclusion In this study I have explored two factors contributing to acceptance of day-care centers, new institutions providing both education and care to young lower-class children, in early twentieth-century Japan. In brief, the main factors were nineteenth -century child-care attitudes and practices and deep-seated nationalism. Nineteenth-century ordinary and elite child-rearing customs and practices help explain why Japanese did not reject institutional care for infants, but they cannot explain why child-care centers flourished in prewar Japan. As we have seen, desire for national progress took diverse forms in the period under study. Besides the development of constitutional politics and policies of capitalist industrialization , war, and empire building by bureaucrats, politicians, and industrialists, other public-minded individuals, including volunteers and professionals in charitable and relief work, also sought the national good. The discourses created by day-care proponents to introduce and justify institutional child care as well as the regulations and programs of individual day-care facilities linked their aims to pressing national issues such as the molding of a citizenry suited to the challenges of economic and imperial expansion and the amelioration of new social problems resulting from industrial and urban development. While day-care programs also attempted to accommodate the needs of lower-class children and parents, as perceived from a middle-class perspective, their justifications contained explicit and implicit benefits for society or the nation as a whole. In concluding , I will summarize the main arguments of this study and discuss some of the implications for Japanese studies and comparative women’s history and gender studies. Reprise In the preceding chapters I have argued that two aspects of nineteenth-century child-rearing attitudes and practices fostered positive responses to day-care facilities when they initially appeared in Japan at the beginning of the twentieth 140 Conclusion century. The first was the willingness of all classes to assign the daily care of young children to kin and nonkin household members as well as to the birth mother. While an heir was necessary to maintain continuity, family values as practiced in daily life stressed hard work for the sake of the household and obedience to coresident in-laws rather than child-rearing or child-bearing as the essence of a young wife’s role. The widespread practices of adopting children and placing them out for apprenticeship or training further illustrate Japanese tolerance for the rearing of children by persons other than their own mother and father . That is, children, even young ones, could be raised outside their natal households.1 The widespread acceptance of nonmaternal caregivers assumed a second important aspect of child-rearing—a conception of child care in day-today life consisting of the relatively simple tasks of keeping a young child safe and well fed. The person who provided daily care for an infant or toddler was not necessarily responsible for socialization, that is, for the instilling of proper speech and manners and the transmission of social, vocational, and other knowledge. Thus nineteenth-century norms had not required that mothers be the primary providers of either care or education to children. The goals and justifications of Japan’s first day-care centers set the pattern for institutions founded later, in part because segments of the national bureaucracy , such as the Relief Section (later the Social Affairs Section) of the Home Ministry’s Local Affairs Bureau and its successor, the Social Affairs Bureau, soon began to endorse day-care centers’ aims, programs, and organization. Futaba Yòchien established moral education as a primary objective for Japanese daycare , while the KSKH centers placed greater emphasis on family economic assistance . For both the private centers established before World War I and the networks of municipal child-care centers founded after the 1918 Rice Riots, economic justifications had greater appeal than educational objectives; however, the fact that day-care professionals tended to regard moral improvement as a prerequisite to financial betterment minimized the tensions between these two objectives . Whether centers gave priority to educational or economic aims, they emphasized the transmission of a common core of values such as industry, savings , frugality, cleanliness, order, obedience to authority, and respect for formal education to lower-class pupils and their parents. Many basic elements of the programs of later private and public centers, such as the children’s curriculum, operating hours, low cost health care, snacks, and parent education meetings, followed the examples set by Futaba Yòchien and KSKH. Like KSKH, large, well-funded...

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