problems in reallocating resources among various age groups.
Fifthly, familial support ratios, which relate the population at ages 45-49 to those aged 65-79 and enable us to assess the number of adult children in terms of a single generation of parents who would have borne them at ages 15-34 (Myers, 1992), are expected to decline by 50 percent from 0.76 in 1990 to 0.38 in 2010, as presented in Table 1. These projected results indicate that the demographic potential of familial support by adult children for the elderly diminishes rapidly, starting from the turn of the century when a large age cohort glut of baby boomers disappears from the age group 45-49.
These pronounced age compositional shifts are closely reflected in the future course of Japanese households. A recent application of a new household projection technique called "HOMES" to Japan has yielded a number of interesting results (Mason, 1988; Mason, Ogawa, and Fukui, 1992). For instance, the average household size will continue to drop from 3.1 members per household in 1990 to 2.6 in 2025. Households headed by the elderly will increase at a very rapid pace, especially those with a head aged 75 or older. By 2025, nearly one in five households will have a head of this age group, as compared with only 4 percent in 1990. Moreover, in 1990, almost three-quarters of all households are intact households where a husband and wife are present. This percentage of intact households declines steadily so that, by 2025, two-thirds of all households are intact; the remaining onethird consists of non4ntact households such as one-person households. Thus,an increasing number of households will face the special pressures that bear on households which do not have the benefit of both a husband and wife present.
These HOMES-based results, coupled with the declining trend of the familial support ratio, point to the high likelihood that the traditional extended family system will be continuously weakened over time. Although the government has recently started, as discussed earlier, its 10-year Golden Plan to alleviate the family's burden in taking care of frail older parents at home, the number of households which do not have caregivers is expected to rise so that the effectiveness of the Golden Plan is likely to be increasingly limited over time.
