Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to revisit the beginning of "Public Day Nursery" and to reconsider how people thought and used public child care at that period. The modern Japanese public day nurseries were established for the lower strata of the city laborers after Kome-Soudou. The nursery services aimed at indoctrinating people, greatly helping poorer parents and saving their children's lives. The public day nurseries were only for very poor families who could not afford education at home. Therefore, users were labeled as exceptions to the rule of the modern family who could afford education at home. This historical study reveals that as public child care in modern Japanese society developed, it also formed a social boundary between the public and the private relative to the ideology of the modern family.
