in a traditional broad-based population pyramid which is an outcome of high fertility and high mortality; as age increases, the next older population dwindles quickly. In such a broad-based, pyramid-shaped population,the old-age persons were of relative rarity and the chances were that only strong and wise ones survived. In a relatively slow-moving society without frequent technological innovation, skills and know-how in productive work were cumulative and the knowledge and wisdom of old men who were scarce in number were very useful and instrumental for work, life and group solidarity. To be sure, along with the process of ageing, this bottom-wide,triangle-shaped population pyramid is transformed into a more rectangularshaped age silhouette created by a decline in fertility and a decline in mortality in the middle-age and the elderly. In such a population, the old-aged persons are no longer rare and uncommon but plentiful and ubiquitous.
In the increasingly ageing society, the centry-old social seniority system together with the patriarchal family or extended family system prevalent in Japan and elsewhere may be expected to crumble someday from the very demographic reasons along with the process of modernization,industrialization and urbanization, though it may still take a long time to take place.
It has been pointed out that many older people wish to continue working because they are still vigorous, want more money, want to establish selfreliance; and they need a sense of being wanted and a sense of being creative. But their wish to continue on working is seldom realized or seldom honoured; in fact, older people are shunned away from the productive work inasmuch as there is stronghold of seniority system and value system in a traditional society in which ascription rather than achievement has been the criterion of selection, criterion of rewand and punishment.This criterion is now under demographic pressure to change and it is a good thing.
