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1 Beginnings In 1868, the opening year of Japan’s modern era, socialization and physical care of youngsters took place almost exclusively in the home, but by the third decade of the twentieth century specialized institutions such as public schools, orphanages , reformatories, kindergartens, day nurseries, child consultation centers, and day-care centers1 assisted increasing numbers of families in bringing up children . Child-care centers were initially established in Japan during the first decade of the twentieth century to educate and care for urban lower-class children under age six. Thus growth of day-care facilities contributed to a modern proliferation of extrafamilial institutions for children that began in the late nineteenth century, an era of unprecedented social change. During the modern era, these and other changes in the methods and content of socialization of preschooland school-aged children had an impact not only on Japanese youngsters themselves , but on their caretakers—especially mothers and households—and ultimately on the entire society as well. The Problem and Its Context Day-care centers appeared in Japan after elementary schools, kindergartens, and day nurseries but before milk depots and mother and child clinics. By 1926, the final year of the Taishò era, social work professionals and educators had come to regard day-care centers as important institutions for children. In the modern era, several types of new facilities for young children developed in Japan. From the late 1870s kindergartens provided special training for a small number of children from elite families, with curricula that sometimes included foreign languages and etiquette. Beginning in the 1890s, a handful of day nurseries (or crèches) located at factories and mines provided long hours of custodial care for workers’ young children but rarely attempted to develop their intellect or character . In contrast to kindergartens, day-care centers served lower-class children, and in contrast to day nurseries, they combined attention to basic physical 10 Beginnings well-being with some of the educative functions of kindergartens.2 Furthermore, in order to improve home life, day-care centers sought to educate not only infants , but their parents and sometimes their older siblings as well. Thus the class of day-care clientele and the combination of physical care and education distinguished these centers from existing early childhood institutions. Day-care centers attracted a number of influential supporters in the twentieth century, including industrial barons such as Shibusawa Eiichi, Òhara Magosabur ò, and Kobayashi Tomijirò; labor and welfare leaders such as Kagawa Toyohiko and Shiga Shinato; educators such as Naruse Jinzò, Tsuda Umeko, and Shimoda Utako; and most important, bureaucrats in the relief section of the powerful Home Ministry.3 By 1909, roughly a decade after the first center had opened, the Home Ministry began to encourage the establishment of child-care facilities. That same year, a handful of child-care centers began to receive imperial funding through the Home Ministry. The ministry continued to award financial assistance to a limited number of child-care facilities during the prewar era, but it did not extend such aid to kindergartens.4 The rate of increase in the number of day-care centers climbed to twenty to forty facilities per year during the late Taishò era—a rate of expansion that impressed even staunch kindergarten supporters. However, while there were 237 regular child-care centers in Japan in 1926, in contrast to 60 in 1919, they still fell short of the numerical strength of kindergartens, which numbered 1,066 in 1926 and 612 in 1919.5 At the First Annual Child Protection Work Conference (Dai Ikkai Zenkoku Jidò Hogo Jigyò Kaigi) in 1925, the chief of the Home Ministry’s Social Bureau , Moriya Eifu, summarized the ministry’s late-1920s view of the importance of day-care centers in sweeping terms: “The social weaknesses regarding children are the root (konpon) of all social problems.”6 Not only for Home Ministry officials but for other supporters as well, the significance of institutional child care lay in its importance to the social order, and implicitly to the nation’s future , more than in quantitative increases in the number of facilities and children enrolled. Conceding the popularity and social utility of day-care, in 1926 the Ministry of Education rewrote its regulations to allow kindergartens to operate each day for longer hours and to enroll children under three years of age, like day-care centers.7 This study treats day-care and child-rearing in households as part of reproduction ,8 an essential but variable process ensuring...

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