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6 Late Taishò Day-Care New Justifications and Old Goals By the 1920s two of Japan’s most renowned day-care experts, Namae Takayuki, the former KSKH director who became a Home Ministry official, and Tokunaga Yuki, director of Futaba Yòchien, began to discuss day-care as an institution to protect working mothers, a departure from previous rationales for child-care centers as aid to working parents and the household economy and as providers of education to poor urban children and their parents. In deemphasizing fathers’ needs for institutional child care, Namae and Tokunaga may have reinforced the inclination of some lesser day-care professionals to stress the crucial role of mothers in child-rearing, a trend that was already visible during the 1910s. However, even during the 1920s insistence on the overarching importance of mothers to the exclusion of other caregivers in the rearing of young children was far from universal. While some nationally renowned child-care specialists and Home Ministry officials adopted this view of motherhood, municipal relief officials and many ordinary day-care teachers were less than enthusiastic in endorsing new conceptions of motherhood. Despite the diffusion of new attitudes toward motherhood, Japanese enthusiasm for institutional day-care continued unabated during the late Taishò era, as demonstrated by solid numerical growth, a broadening geographic distribution of child-care facilities, and the development of new types of centers. As the 1920s progressed, permanent day-care facilities began to spread beyond the great metropolitan regions to smaller cities. Seasonal centers sprang up in rural villages. The first public day-care centers were established in the great cities, and the total number of day-care centers spiraled upward. During the 1920s the pace of establishment quickened to twenty to forty centers per year from 1922 to 1926, compared to five to ten per year between 1918 and 1921. By 1926, the final year of the Taishò era, 273 centers were operating in Japan, compared to the 15 that existed in 1912.1 The expansion of child-care facilities prompted the Ministry of Education to recognize the viability of day-care centers as educational institutions for young children. In 1925 the ministry modified its 114 Late Taishò Day-Care regulations to allow kindergartens to become more like day-care centers. The new rules authorized greater flexibility in curriculum, a larger maximum enrollment , longer operating hours, and infant care. Just as rising awareness of ideas about mothers’ special role in child-rearing had not undermined Japanese receptivity to day-care in the first half of the Taishò era, neither did it do so in the second half of the period. The sternest criticisms leveled by prominent experts such as Ogawa Shigejirò and Takada Shingò went no further than calling day-care a “necessary evil,” and both continued to recommend expansion of Japan’s child-care facilities during the 1910s and beyond. Neither they nor Namae and Tokunaga harped on the faults of day-care. Also conspicuously absent are lengthy discussions of the harm to infants caused by daily separation from their mothers or the superiority of nurturing by the mother at home as compared to institutional care. In contrast, as the twentieth century progressed, U.S., French, German, and English child protection experts increasingly stressed the irreplaceable role of mothers in the nurturing of children. Western experts dismissed day-care centers as at best a necessary evil and instead recommended other types of child welfare institutions—mothers’ pensions, milk depots, mother-child clinics, nursing rooms in factories, and motherhood education programs—that promoted maternal care of infants. Support for day-care strengthened only in the face of dire circumstances, for example, the need to mobilize women for wartime production. In the West, conventional wisdom held that the benefits of reduced infant mortality due to maternal care of young children outweighed the advantages of providing economic aid and moral education to the urban poor, the primary Japanese motivations for supporting day-care.2 In order to explain the seeming paradox of day-care in Japan—steady expansion of facilities and positive attitudes toward institutional child-care despite the diffusion of unfavorable viewpoints—this chapter scrutinizes late Taishò (1920s) changes in experts’ views, adult programs, center regulations, and the behavior of urban lower-class mothers. These reveal shifts in arguments for daycare and views of motherhood as well as the strength of their appeal to leaders in the day-care field, rank and file workers at child-care facilities, and lower-class urban...

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