they regard as rather short-sighted and unbalanced.
As already mentioned, in Japan and East Asia, Confucianism provides the people in this region with major moral and ethical code governing the daily conduct of people. But, if there are any gaps in tffis outstanding moral system and philosophy, it is that sufficient attention has never been paid to women. In Confucianism's doctrine, there is no status of women in the family. In the Confucian regime, women have long been considered a kind of childbearing machine and domestic servant for men. Now in the 1990s women are making quiet and non-militant protest against men and against the long-established and cherished East Asian version of Machismo. It is assumed that some of the consequences out of such women's revenge would be the postponement of marriage, non-marriage and nonbearing of children on the part of women, hence decline of fertility. Such a situation will continue unitl the day when men come to make a peace treaty with women, until the day when women's status has been elevated so as to become equal and equitable with men's, and until the day when women's work aspiration has been harmonized with their childbearing and rearing activities with full cooperation by men and with institutional support by the Government.
H. Population Ageing in Different Prefectures
Another important dimension of popultion ageing is prefectural disparities. Table S shows prefectural distribution of various ageing scores in 1995, according to the latest population census. Glancing at this table,one may be quite surprised by the presence of a considerable range of prefectural variation on each indicator of population ageing. As expected, those prefectures within metropolitan regions, including Tokyo, Saitama, Chiba, Kanagawa, Aichi, Osaka, etc., unmistakably represent lower scores of the percentage of the aged, whereas those relatively rural-agricultural prefectures situated remote from the metropolitan areas, such as Shimane, Akita,Kochi, Kagoshima, etc., indicate higher scores. In general , those centrally located metropolitan prefectures such as Tokyo and Osaka tend to have a higher proportion of the working age population among the total population mostly becaue of excessive in-migration in that age category, hence ageing process is slow. On the other hand, those prefectures, which are distant from the metropolitan areas and are traditionally agricultural or fishery-oriented, tend to demonstrate a reverse trend.
