Reforming the Japanese Preschool System : An Ethnographic Case Study of Policy Implementation

This is an ethnographic study of how two Japanese kindergartens are implementing the yōhoichigenka policy aimed at reforming the Japanese early childhood education system. The cases of these two kindergartens demonstrate what happens when a top-down mandate reaches the level of individual programs. The programs creatively find ways of responding to the reform mandate and to social change while maintaining what their administrators view as their pedagogical traditions. This paper also argues for the value of ethnographic methods to show how local programs are creative, resistant, and pragmatic in how they deal with top down pressures and directives.


Introduction
For over a century there have been two forms of provision of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Japan: yōchien (kindergartens for children ages 3-6 years old) and hoikuen (daycare centers for children ages 0-6).Yōho Ichigenka ("Kindergarten/Daycare Center Synthesis") is a policy that calls for combining these two institutions into a new kind of program to be called kodomoen (integrated child care and education centers), and placing both forms of early childhood education provision under one central governance structure.This policy, which was first suggested in 1963, over the next few decades was promoted periodically by the government, but with little progress toward a merger.One crucial obstacle was that daycare centers and kindergartens have long been governed by different government ministries, kindergartens by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (hereafter MEXT), and daycare centers by the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare (hereafter MHLW).The creation of a unified system of early childhood education and care therefore required not just compromise between these two huge and powerful bureaucracies, but also between two sectors of early childhood education with different histories, purposes, and constituencies.
This paper explores some of the challenges and possibilities of this reform from the point of view of one category of actors: yōchien (kindergarten) directors.Because policy is implemented not just from the top down but also from the bottom up, to understand the kodomoen reform, in addition to policy analyses of political wrangling and statistical analyses of the numbers of hoikuen and yōchien that have closed or been transformed into kodomoen, we need nuanced case studies of how local programs are dealing with the new policy.As Mabrey McClaughlin (1987) argued: At each point in the policy process, a policy is transformed as individuals interpret and respond to it.What actually is delivered or provided under the aegis of a policy depends finally on the individual at the end of the line, or the "street level bureaucrat" (Weatherley & Lipsky, 1977).This perspective shifts the focus of analysis away from institutions and institutional goals to individuals and individual incentives, beliefs, and capacity.Organizations don't innovate or implement change, individuals do.Individuals responsible for carrying out a policy act not only from institutional incentives, but also from professional and personal motivation (p. 173-174).
Following McLaughlin, our focus in this paper is on how the kodomoen policy reform is being implemented in local settings.Our work here follows recent school-based studies of educational reforms in Japanese primary and secondary schools by Peter Cave (2016) and Chris Bjork (2016) that demonstrate that even in an educational system as vertical as Japan's, school administrators and teachers have considerable impact on policy implementation.Ryoko Tsuneyoshi (2004) has argued that educational reform in Japan is characterized by reactions to challenges that are often defined as "prospective crises."Reform of education in Japan at the primary and secondary level has focused on addressing perceived crises of children's moral development and academic preparation by making changes to curriculum and pedagogy (Cave, 2016;Lee, 2001).In contrast, reform at the early childhood education and care level has focused on addressing a perceived crisis stemming from demographic and social change, by making structural changes in program funding and provision, with little or no attention to questions of curriculum and pedagogy, which continue to be left mostly to the judgement of practitioners (Hayashi, 2011).

The Context of Japanese Early Childhood Education and Care Reform
By the middle of the 1990s, a decline in the number of preschool-aged children coupled with changes in the labor force and growing concerns about the cost of duplication of services led to a renewed determination by the central government and to increased pressure on MEXT and MHLW to implement a unified ECEC system.As a government committee reported in 1996: "As we have entered an era of declining birthrate, facilities of yōchien and hoikuen should be merged in order to serve the various needs of children and families."In 2006, the government issued the law titled "The Act on Advancement of Comprehensive Services Related to Education, Child Care, etc. of Preschool Children."This act formally mandated the creation of a merged system and introduced the concept of the nintei kodomoen, (literally, "an authorized children's garden"), a new type of institution that would combine the functions of yōchien and hoikuen.The Japanese kodomoen has analogues in the "Child Centers" and "Early Childhood Education and Care" programs that were created to merge the functions traditionally served by nursery schools (part-day programs for the richer classes) and daycare centers (full-day programs for the poorer) in the United States and other countries.
The kodomoen policy initiative was driven by two major social phenomena: a low birthrate and an increase in participation of women in the workforce.The birthrate in 2005 was 1.26, which is the lowest number on record in Japan and well below the figure of 2.07, which is generally considered a minimum birthrate to maintain the population.This low birthrate combined with high longevity has led to an upside down demographic pyramid, with only 13.7 % of the population under 15 years old, 65.8% between 15 and 64, and 20.1% over 65.
One government response to this low birthrate has been to encourage young women to have children by expanding childcare services and extending parental leave under a policy dubbed "The Angel Plan" (Roberts, 2002).Reducing or even eliminating the cost to parents of early childhood education and care, as has recently been proposed (c.f.Koizumi, 2017), is seen as an investment in raising the birth rate, based on the logic that this will reduce one of the economic barriers parents face when making decisions about having children.More directly, free all-day care for infants and young children will allow more young women to stay in the workforce, which will ameliorate the decline in number of working adults and thereby increase the number of taxpayers.The logic for the kodomoen early childhood education and care reform therefore seems to be irrefutable.However, there is political resistance arising out of the demographics of Japanese politics: the predominance of postreproductive voters in Japan's aging society leads to pressure on politicians to channel more government money to geriatric services rather than to early childhood services.
Even though the birthrate has been decreasing for many years, in many communities there are long waiting lists for childcare slots.In 2015, over 23,000 children were on waiting lists for childcare.As Yuki Imoto (2007) explains: We have seen that the problem of taikijidou [waiting lists] is not due to the lack of overall places in preschools, of which there should be a surplus in supply, but due to severe imbalances -firstly the imbalance in the demand for youchien and hoikuen; secondly the imbalance within the hoikuen that cater for infants and those that only take children over the age of three; and thirdly, the discrepancy between urban and rural regions (p.96).
Another factor driving enrollments in daycare programs is that in contemporary Japan increasing numbers of young women do not want or cannot afford to interrupt employment when they have a baby.This factor is also related to changing attitudes about women's work, marriage, and family (Roberts, 1994).
For the past 30 years or so it has become increasingly clear to policy makers concerned about the inefficiency and cost of the nation running two parallel forms of ECEC that this split system is untenable.Policy makers repeatedly have laid out the logical rationale for reform and offered hoikuen and yōchien a variety of incentives to change, and yet the kodomoen merged system initiative has grown only slowly.To date, a decade after the formal introduction of "The Act on Advancement of Comprehensive Service Related to Education, Child Care, etc. of Preschool Children," fewer than 10% of the early childhood education and care programs in the nation were kodomoen.In 2015, there were 2,836 kodomoen (19,428 children) in Japan, as compared with 11,674 yōchien (1,557,461 children) and 23,533 hoikuen (2,330,658 children).
Many factors contribute to why the conversion of hoikuen and yōchien has proceeded so slowly.This paper addresses one piece of this story: the challenges the kodomoen policy reform presents to private yōchien.We focus on case studies of private rather than public yōchien for two reasons: private yōchien serve four times as many children than do public ones, and private programs have more latitude than do public programs in how they respond to social change and political and demographic pressures.We focus on yōchien rather than hoikuen because hoikuen are under less pressure to become kodomoen than are yōchien.Over the past two decades, the percentage of 4-and 5-year-old children in yōchien as compared with hoikuen has steadily declined.Hoikuen, which have always provided all-day care for infants and toddlers as well as for 4-6 year olds, already are functioning in most respects like kodomoen, and therefore have little incentive to change (Poole, 2016).It is yōchien for whom the demographic changes represent an existential crisis, as the number of children ages 4-6 years old whose parents are looking for a part-day program has shrunk the most dramatically.For several decades yōchien in communities with declining numbers of young children have been adapting by extending their hours, taking children younger than age 3, and offering after-school care to primary school students.
This paper presents case studies of how two Japanese private yōchien are implementing the yōho ichigenka policy reform and pressure to become kodomoen.It describes the strategies these two yōchien are employing to balance government requirements, changing demographics, and parental needs and preferences with their resources and sense of purpose.These two cases show how these yōchien are creatively adapting to the policy reform in ways that allow them, to the degree possible, to maintain their traditions, philosophy, and client base.As yōchien are slowly evolving into kodomoen, case studies of the strategies ECEC programs are employing to adapt to the new governance structures can provide a nuanced understanding of intricacies of the kodomoen policy implementation.
The material used in this paper comes from interviews with administrators at two preschools: Midori Yōchien and Sakura Yōchien (pseudonyms).Midori Yōchien is a private kindergarten, run as a family business, in a bustling urban neighborhood of Tokyo.Located in a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Sakura Yōchien is run by the family of a Buddhist priest.When we visited Midori and Sakura in the spring of 2016, both preschools had just completed the construction of new buildings and for the first time were enrolling infants and toddlers.
This is an ethnographic case study; we have worked with the staff at these schools for many years.Over the past five years when we visited these research sites and asked the directors how things are going, they showed us the new buildings under construction and told us about their plans to expand their services.This led us to decide to do some interviews with these directors focused on their responses to the kodomoen reform.We interviewed the pairs of retiring and new directors once each year from 2014-2017.

The Institutional Cultures of Yōchien and Hoikuen
The origins of ECEC in Japan, as in many other countries, began with a split between part-day programs for children of the higher classes, and full-day programs for children of the working classes.The late 19 th century in Europe and the United States saw the development of kindergartens, which were conceived as part-day programs for 3-and 4year-old children from middle class and wealthy families, and daycare centers, which were created to address the needs of working women, impoverished and immigrant families who were viewed as unable and even unfit to provide their infants and young children with a healthy start to life (Lissak, 1989).By the late 19 th century, nursery schools and childcare centers began to appear in Japan, often set up by missionary organizations (Wollons, 2000).In Japan, as in Europe and the US, the two systems historically have served children from families of different social classes.
A century ago and still today, Japanese families that cannot afford to have mothers not working outside the home need a different kind of childcare than middle class and wealthy families with mothers who do not need to work outside the home.Yōchien, which have traditionally served stay-at-home mothers, are not set up to provide daycare for children under 3 years old.Moreover, the traditional 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. schedule of the yōchien does not meet the needs of families where both parents are employed outside the home.Hoikuen, which are open from about 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. and serve infants through children ages 6 years old, are set up to meet the needs of working parents.
The divide is one of not just hours but also of purpose, social class, and status.Yōchien directors tend to view hoikuen as doing childcare and not knowing how to do education; hoikuen directors tend to view yōchien as not knowing how to serve the needs of working families and not knowing childcare (Poole, 2016).In Preschool in Three Cultures, Tobin et al. (1989) described how yōchien tend to view hoikuen: A sense of superiority and even smug condescension is apparent in yōchien teachers' and especially administrators' suggestion that what they do in their preschools cannot be compared to what is done in a hoikuen.When asked to compare her school to a hoikuen, an Osaka yōchien assistant principal said: "I think one really can't compare the two because they are so basically different in educational approach and goals and history…."(p.45).
In 1947, The School Education Law defined yōchien as educational institutions and formally placed them under the control of the Ministry of Education; the Child Welfare Law, passed the same year, defined hoikuen as welfare facilities and placed them under the control of the Ministry of Health and Welfare.These two ministries consistently have resisted ceding control of their sectors of early childhood education and care.Schoppa (1991) has argued that a distinctive feature of educational reform in Japan is that the battles are fought less between political parties, among educators, or in the court of public opinion, than by government ministries, which wield much more power, vis-a-vis politicians, than do their counterparts in the US and the UK.While politicians call for removing the distinctions between yochien and hoikuen, MEXT bureaucrats have been a counterforce, one that protects the interests and is for the most part consistent with the perspectives of yōchien directors.

Midori Yōchien
Midori Yochien was founded in 1970 by Toshi Yamada, who worked with an architect to design a preschool building that would support his philosophy of "relaxed education" and "play-based curriculum."These remain Midori's guiding principles.In April of 2016 Midori added a kodomoen program in a new building constructed adjoining the Midori Yōchien playground.The director of Midori Yōchien, Katsu Yamada, is the son of the kindergarten's previous director and founder, Toshi Yamada.Katsu resisted his father's cautionary advice and spent a large amount of money to add a kodomoen program.
They have kept the name Midori Yōchien on the school entrance and in their daily conversation, but on their official documents have changed their name to the legalistically awkward: "A yōhoichigen-type accredited kodomoen Midori Yōchien."Having added the new program, they now serve three types of children.The first is yōchien children ages 3-6 who attend yōchien for 4-5 hours.The second group is kodomoen children ages 3-6 who attend for up to 11 hours each day, going to the yōchien program for 4-5 hours, from about 9:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and spending the rest of the day in the kodomoen building.The third type is kodomoen children aged 0-2 who spend full days in the kodomoen.
Running a kodomoen program with the MHLW money means Midori cannot choose which children they enroll and families cannot choose Midori.It is the local district office that decides which children in the community are selected for the kodomoen program.The district also sets the tuition and fees that can be charged for the full-day child care program.
Midori's solution to the challenge of creating a kodomoen program is to have a partial segregation of the two populations: the kodomoen children spend part of the day with only kodomoen children in the kodomoen building; yōchien children spend their day only in the yōchien building.But the children over 3 years old are all together in their yōchien classrooms from 9 a.m.-2 p.m.
In designing the new program, Katsu Yamada decided to have two entrances in the new kodomoen building, one for children to enter when they come from home in the morning, the other doorway for going back and forth between the kodomoen building and the yōchien building that is on the other side of the playground.Katsu explained how this architectural arrangement demarcates two sites at the school, each with a distinctive mood: This is the moment I feel the real difference between yōchien and kodomoen.
Like a few minutes ago when we were in the kodomoen building, one child was hanging onto my leg.He was relaxed.I wasn't a distant figure to him to be treated with restraint or formality.This never happens on the yōchien side.
There they know that I am the director and they know how to behave towards me with some restraint.If they are at school for the whole day, children need a space which feels family-like.It's good to have both settings in that sense, yōchien and kodomoen.So the children can begin the day in the kodomoen, then go to the yōchien for the morning and lunch, and then come back to the family feel of the kodomoen in the early afternoon, when the yōchien day ends.
Katsu's comment here speaks to the spatiality of culture, and how the architecture and routines work alongside cultural beliefs and practices in the design and function of the Midori kodomoen program.By having two separate buildings, which are home to two different programs, with different architectures and feelings and expectations for comportment, Midori gives the kodomoen children a combination of the family like warmth of a hoikuen with the structure of the kindergarten.This arrangement gives the kodomoen children a "pure" yōchien experience for six hours a day.Yamada senior and junior had a difference of opinion about whether or not to create a kodomoen program, as Toshi Yamada explained to us: Over time Katsu convinced me.I first disagreed with his idea to add a kodomoen program.I've been doing yōchien for many years, believing that this is best for children.I believe that ideally all children should get a yōchien education.But Katsu told me that there are two types of young women these days; ones who need to work for money and ones who want to have a career.I want to support those women who seek a career, so I eventually agreed with his idea.It's challenging, but in the end, I agreed with him and let him go ahead.
There is a suggestion here of a social class divide.Mothers who "work for money" are presumably the working-class mothers who have no choice but to work, and whom hoikuen have traditionally served.Unmentioned but implied in Toshi's comments is the type of middle class mother who stops working when she has a child and who has traditionally enrolled her child in yōchien."Mothers who want to have a career" refers to a type of Japanese mothers who were once rare, and now a larger and growing segment of Japanese society.These are the mothers who in terms of social class are the typical yōchien client, but whose career aspirations do not match with the yōchien's traditional part-day hours.
We caught Midori in a moment of transition, not just shifting from a yōchien to a kodomoen, but also generationally, as a son was taking over from his father.Toshi Yamada decided that it was time for him to defer to Katsu's ideas.Katsu is committed to maintaining Midori's yōchien tradition while also positioning Midori to thrive as a business in the future.Just as 40 years ago Toshi Yamada hired an architect to design an ideal preschool, Katsu hired an architect to design the ideal kodomoen.Midori is still in the process of working out how best to integrate the two programs.

Sakura Yōchien
The Yagi family founded Sakura Yōchien in 1953, on the grounds of their temple on a hillside in Kyoto.The kindergarten's guiding principles from its founding have been based on Buddhist philosophy and the values of children being cheerful, honest, and friendly (akaruku, tadashiku, nakayoku).Four years ago, the vice-director of Sakura Yōchien, Maki Yagi, a granddaughter of the yōchien's founder, decided to add a hoikubu (child care section).Sakura opened this service in April of 2016, at the same time as Midori opened their kodomoen program.Sakura is calling their under-3 program a hoikubu, and the new program is not officially a kodomoen, but instead a Kyoto-city accredited "small-scale childcare service."The program enrolls infants from 18 months to 2 years old, for eight hours per day.When the children in this program reach the age of 3, they move to the yōchien.As a service for children of parents who work full days, Sakura provides supervised care (azukari hoiku) for yōchien children from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Sakura spent 200 million yen (about two million dollars) of their own funds to build a new multi-story building to house their hoikubu, with the local government contributing 16 million yen (about $160,000).Of this expenditure the former director, Ryoko Yagi, explained: "We don't view this as taking a risk.We view it as an investment in our future."If Sakura had been willing to become an official kodomoen they could have received government funds to construct the building.Spending their own money was a strategy to preserve independence.
Sakura differs from Midori in the way they handle services for children ages 3-6 years old who need full day care.At Midori, these children spend from approximately 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the yōchien program, and move to the kodomoen building from 2 p.m. until they are picked up by their working parents.In contrast, at Sakura there is no official hoiku program for the 3-6 year olds to attend before and after their day in yōchien.Instead, these children are enrolled in the Sakura yōchien program, and then those who need full day care stay in the yōchien for extended day-care when their classmates go home at 2 p.m.
Another difference between the Sakura and Midori programs is that Sakura runs two parallel programs for children under two: one toddler program enrolls children through the local district office, whose parents pay on a sliding fee scale; the other toddler program serves families who pay tuition out of pocket.The children in these two programs do not mix.They are housed in the same building, but on floors, with different caretakers, schedules, and kinds of lunch.
Unlike hoikuen, Sakura's hoikubu program does not take babies under 18 months.The Yagis explained that this is because they do not see baby care as consistent with their tradition and mission, or as welcomed by their staff.There is a general reluctance of yōchien teachers to work with younger children.A survey suggests that 70% of preschool teachers disagree with the yōhoichigenka/kodomoen policy (Shindo, 2008).As the Yagis explained, enrolling infants is a challenge for their teachers, whose training and experience is with older children: Ryoko Yagi: Caring for infants is very different work, and requires very different skills.We may gradually expand the program to serve children under eighteen months old.By doing so only gradually we can give our teachers time to get used to dealing with infants.Maki Yagi: For the new hoikubu program we have hired new teachers who have expertise in working with children under age 3.This doesn't mean that yōchien teachers won't eventually work in the hoikubu program.Some may shift to hoikubu next year.Whatever our backgrounds and training, we are still one team.
Most Japanese work places provide for one year of parental leave, which means that Sakura is not a feasible option for most working parents.Maki commented: I think, sure, many mothers work.But I believe that the future is for mothers to have more control over their work conditions so they can spend more time with their children.I want our hoikubu to serve women who want to have a balance between their work and parenting, especially when their children are little.It's difficult, for example, for a doctor to find such a balance.But even a doctor can cut back on work hours when her children are small.With this idea in mind, our program is designed to serve mothers who find a way to be home with their child for at least the first 18 months, and who after that want care for their child for eight rather than for 11 hours a day.As a result, the parents who enroll their toddlers here are parents who are very committed to their parenting, rather than for parents who just want to put their children in care as early and as long as possible.Because the district assigns children to daycare services, serving the right kind of parents is tricky.
Maki's comments here suggest that she has a vision of Sakura serving a very specific kind of working mother: a woman who values her career, but is not so career-oriented that she does not also value being an engaged mother.The implication is also that Sakura does not intend to serve women who cannot afford to cut back on working full time, and who therefore need full-time childcare, including infant care.We can speculate that not offering care for children under 18 months is a strategy to keep the most work-oriented mothers from enrolling their child at Sakura.This system has the effect of excluding the children of mothers who cannot afford to stay home with their infants.But as Maki explained, this is not the intent of the system, as Sakura has traditionally served the full range of social classes who live in their Kyoto neighborhood: For a long time there has been the image in Japan that hoikuen is the place where working-class parents put their children.However, these days, I think the social class barrier is getting less and less as more and more mothers are working.Because most of these mothers get only one year at most of parental leave after having a baby, this means that hoikuen are the best place for mothers who want or need infant care.What this means for us, as a traditional yōchien program, is that we only want to attract parents who are giving a lot of thought about the need for a balance between work and childrearing.
Maki's comments suggest simultaneously both a continuation and a rethinking of a longstanding binary distinction between two types of mothers.One type, the type Sakura seeks to serve with their extended day program, is a mother who works outside the home, but still takes an active role in childrearing.The other type, the type best served by a hoikuen program, is a working woman who for reasons of choice or necessity places work before childrearing.
Yuki Imoto (2007) argues that such contemporary discourses of motherhood and early childhood education can be traced back over a century, and specifically to the 1899 Imperial Ordinance on Elementary Education and Infant Training, whose regulations required: . ..limited kindergarten classroom time to five hours per day, ensuring that operating hours were too limited to permit the schools to care for children while their parents worked.It thus worked in consonance with the newly introduced concepts espoused by the MoE of ryosai kenbo ('good wife, wise mother') -a Confucian-tainted 'Japanized' rhetoric of the modern Western middle-class ideology of family domesticity, which rendered women as the homemakers marking a gendered division of labour within the family and transferring the responsibilities of childrearing to the mother (p.92).
We are not suggesting that Ryoko and Maki Yagi, who, after all, are women who have combined motherhood with careers, are unsympathetic to contemporary pressures on working mothers.However, we can hear in their struggles to identify the types of mothers they seek to serve an echo of a much older discourse about women's roles, social class, and early childhood education.As Imoto (2007) writes: In the debates that take place within these reforms, the terms kyouiku and hoiku will continue to act as the key symbolic terms on which notions of motherhood and childhood are constructed."Education" and "childcare," within the discourse pertaining to the preschool system, have acted as symbolic terms that sustain the 'cultural' differences of the yōchien and hoikuen as separate institutions" (p.88). . . .The question of what is kyoiku and what is hoiku thus remains unresolved. . .In fact, it is the very vagueness of these terms that makes them a powerful and instrumental rhetoric in defending particular views or interests" (p.98).
As they are steering their program moving through the transition of adding services for toddlers and for children needing extended day care, the Yagis are both responding to and resisting the government's directives.Ryoko Yagi emphasized to us that as their program changes, Sakura continues to be guided by their commitment to children, one that she complains is not understood by many policy makers and bureaucrats: Our country still has a serious waiting list problem.People in the government who deal with this problem tend to focus on finding childcare slots for children.They are happy when they find any place for them.Their first priority is "putting those children somewhere."They give little thought to who will be caring for these children.I am worried that this national system encourages parents to have this idea of wanting "just to put their children somewhere."For me, from my position, from children's perspective, there is no children's voice in this policy.It's just like looking in a train station for a place to leave their baggage (nimotsu o azukeru noto ishō).
In this statement Ryoko Yagi expresses her educational philosophy as well as her concern that a preschool must be a place not where children are stored during the day, but a program where they are cared for and nurtured.Suggesting that in the eyes of bureaucrats, young children are like left baggage is telling, as the root of the word for the left luggage service in train stations, nimotsu o azukeru tokoro, is also used in the kodomoen policy for after-school care, which is officially called azukari hoiku.
Greg Poole (2016) suggests that this notion of childcare as a kind of child storage service reflects an unfortunate increasing commercialization of daycare in Japan: "There is a strong tendency to 'provide a service' for the customers-working parents.For a fee, these working parents are provided with the service of "child-care"-this is a commercial transaction focused on the needs of parents in the age of 'dual income' (p.117)".We can read Ryoko Yagi's comment about wanting to "attract parents who are giving a lot of thought about the need for a balance between work and childrearing" as a rebuff to the government bureaucrats who just want a place to put children, to cynical child-care providers who market themselves in terms of providing a service to busy parents, and to the parents who view child care this way.These are the parents Sakura does not want to attract and the kind of service they want to make clear they do not provide.Parents who want this kind of child-care should look elsewhere.

Responding to Challenges
While it was once the case that yōchien and hoikuen served very different kinds of families and offered very different kinds of early childhood care and education, their practices and missions have grown more similar over time (Imoto, 2007).Nevertheless, the government has been trying to merge the two systems since the 1990s, with only modest success to date.
MEXT and the MHLW have their own institutional cultures, which is one obvious difficulty to combining the two institutions.The two case studies in this paper suggest that there is resistance not just in the bureaucracies that oversee ECEC programs, but also at the level of the local preschools.Yōchien like Midori and Sakura are moving in the direction of kodomoen, but they are doing so on their own terms, based on their physical, economic, and personnel resources, their understanding of the local communities and constituencies they serve, and fidelity to their history and sense of purpose.Both schools put a high value on maintaining their traditions of quality yōchien education and on their reputation as the leading program in their community.And both are determined to continue to serve the kinds of families they have in the past, while also expanding their client base.
For them to transform themselves fully from yōchien to kodomoen would require overcoming several crucial challenges.One challenge is that they do not have expertise for dealing with children under age 3.They have 50 years of experience doing one kind of early childhood education, which is targeted to children ages 3-6 years old.If they were to become kodomoen they would need to serve a more diverse set of families than they have served in the past as yōchien.Working with this wider range of children and families will require a shift in their sense of mission and hiring staff who have expertise in working with younger children.This is related to a more subjective and existential fear, a fear that if they were to become a kodomoen they would lose something essential or even be contaminated.While the name kodomoen is new, a program that offers full-day care and education to children from birth to age 6 cannot escape the association the hoikuen's history of serving working class families.Administrators at both yōchien referred to the importance of preserving their "way."Their identity and purpose are rooted in the belief that there is "a Midori way" and "a Sakura way."When speaking of their "way," they are referring to a combination of their implicit and explicit pedagogical practices, their identity, and their reputation, which they are endeavoring to pass down from one generation to the next.
Private yōchien like Midori and Sakura that have a long history, with continuous ownership, a low turnover of staff, and children whose parents are alumni, take care not to lose their strengths in a rush to become something they are not.They feel like they already know how to do something very well and that this is worth protecting.Whenever people ask someone to do something new, the risk is they will stop doing the thing that they do well.There are many businesses that are successful at small scale but fail if they grow too much or too quickly or change their focus.With such concerns in mind, the directors of these two preschools are being careful about how they make changes, and to do so on their own terms.
For these reasons, Midori and Sakura for many years resisted adding hoiku services.But in the past several years increased pressure from the government coupled with generational changes in the leadership of both schools led both of these yōchien to proceed on a path of change.For the last 20 years, the older generation of leadership at both preschools resisted the government's call to remake themselves as kodomoen.An interesting similarity is that both programs are making the transition towards being more like a kodomoen at the same time that they are in the midst of transferring leadership from one generation to the next (Toshi to Katsu, Ryoko to Maki).At both yōchiens, it is the new generation of leaders who are pushing for and figuring out how to implement the yōhoichigenka policy.The younger generation of leaders at each school have made calculations based on their reading of what it will take for them to remain successful in the long term.The impetus to change is not just from above, but also from an urgency that the directors of Midori and Sakura feel to expand their client pool in a time of shrinking birth rate and changing women's labor force participation.The new generation of leaders at these preschools are not afraid of change, but they have concerns.Their challenge is to make changes while protecting their sense of who they are and their reputation.
As Hayashi (2011) argued in an analysis of Japan's early childhood education curriculum guidelines, a low-intervention, hands-off approach is typical of how MEXT has historically dealt with yōchien.MEXT proscribes "hardware" such as ratios and hygiene, but gives great latitude to yōchien on "software" such as schedule, curriculum, and pedagogy.This suggests that for yōchien, it is not a matter of just following directives from above on how to convert themselves into a kodomoen, but finding their own way.
Sakura and Midori are making changes at the same time, in response to similar pressures, and with similar concerns about the future of their schools, but with different strategies and solutions.Sakura's solution is to start a hoikubu program, but not take government money.In this way they can attract young children of working mothers without having to deal with the kodomoen bureaucracy.This course is risky financially.Their sense of how burdensome they would find government restrictions is so strong that they are willing to spend a huge amount of their own money.They are protecting their identity and legacy by building a wall between themselves and the kodomoen bureaucracy.Another kind of wall they are building is between the two kinds of young children they are serving in their hoiku programs.One group are children whose tuition is paid by welfare funds from their district; the other group are children whose parents pay tuition.These two groups of children are in the same building, but they interact only minimally, as they have their own classrooms, playgrounds, and food.
Midori's solution is to add a kodomoen program and then mix the kodomoen and yōchien children during the day.Children ages 3 -6 years old with working parents arrive at the kodomoen building early in the morning, then at 9 a.m.move to the adjoining yōchien.At 2 p.m. when many of their classmates go home, they go back to the kodomoen, saying tadaima (I'm home) as they enter.

Conclusion
After more than 20 years of struggle to create a unified system of early childhood education and care, Japan seems to be on the verge of doing so.This paper has presented the cases of two yōchien that seem to be responding successfully to the kodomoen reform and, more generally, to the demographic and social changes that are rationale for the reform.They have added programs for infants and for children needing full-day care in ways that they feel have allowed them to maintain their core values and retain an adequate level of autonomy.
Midori and Sakura are yōchien with excellent reputations in their communities, in neighborhoods with relatively stable populations, that have been successful businesses for many years, and that are run by thoughtful, forward thinking directors.The fact that even programs like these with significant strengths and advantages are struggling to implement the kodomoen reform and have only done so by carefully balancing risks and rewards suggests that this reform may be more problematic for existing yōchien that are less well positioned than Midori and Sakura.We need research on the impacts of the kodomoen reform on yōchien of varying quality and resources, in rural as well as urban neighborhoods.There is also a need for research, like Greg Poole's study of preschool education and care in a rural area of Japan (2016), on the impacts of the reform on various types of hoikuen.
One implication of our study is that well intended reforms that address pressing social problems can sometimes be counterproductive.For example, new bureaucratic demands and regulations and a change in the clients they serve can lead a successful ECEC program to lose its way.Moreover, the uncertainty caused by the call to create a new type of childcare institution can create market pressures that may supplant existing well-functioning programs and destabilize a system that for many decades overall has well served the needs of children, families, and the society.
The kodomoen reform may have unintended implications on social class division in Japanese society.Japan's bifurcated ECEC system was constructed over a century ago based on an economic model of haves and have nots, with hoikuen serving children of working class families and yōchien children from the middle class.In calling for the creation of single, unified system of ECEC services, the kodomoen policy does not have an explicit intent of reducing the class divide.But it can be argued that, like the effects on a society of public primary and secondary education, a unified ECEC system that provides local preschools for all residents of a community can have a democratizing, class-leveling effect.This may be one important, but unintended impact of the kodomoen reform as Midori and Sakura and other yōchien, by extending their age range and hours, come to serve more working class children than they have in the past.On the other hand, an unintended and unwanted effect of the reform may be more class segregation.Wealthier parents needing under-3 and full day care who currently enroll their children in hoikuen may, post-reform, enroll their children in kodomoen like Midori and Sakura that were once yōchien, leaving their less wealthy counterparts behind in more segregated hoikuen.This may eventually undermine the hoikuen system by reallocating government funds away from hoikuen and towards programs serving the middle class, thereby exacerbating the social class divide in Japan.This problem is akin to the tensions in the United States and other countries that are transitioning from needs-based to universal ECEC services (Fuller, 2008).With government funding already tight and contested in Japan and the largest share of the public budget going towards the elderly, reforms that shift financial assistance to all families for early childhood education and care may work to support the portion going to working class families.In practical terms this may occur if the portion of the budget for ECEC allocated to the Ministry of Education, which has a universal mission, is increased, and the portion going to the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, which has a needs-based mission, is proportionally decreased.
The case studies presented in this paper are of two programs caught in a moment of transformation.In this sense, this is an ideal time to study them, before they or we know exactly what the future holds for them.Five years or so ago the new generation of directors at these programs, Katsu Yagata and Maki Yagi, read the situation in a similar way and decided it was time to make a new investment and change their programs.They did not yet need to do so -their enrollments for time being are good.But it is clear that more of their parents want full-day care and both programs take pride in being responsive to family needs.They also want to be pro-active in preparing themselves for an uncertain future.The directors of both yōchien emphasized the need to be flexible in the face of changing conditions.
In this paper, we have analyzed the thoughtfulness and the implicit cultural beliefs these two yōchien are bringing to their engagement with the kodomoen policy.This kind of analysis can show what happens when a top-down mandate, with some force behind it, reaches the level of individual programs.This paper is also an argument for the need for more such case studies of how government policies get implemented at the level of individual schools.Policies are not just passed and implemented, but rather, local programs are creative, resistant, and pragmatic in how they deal with such top down pressures and directives.