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 this 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 non-bearing of children on the part of women, hence decline of fertility. Such a situation will continue until 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.
2. Population Ageing and Changes in the Family and Household
A. General Framework
The family or household is a single unit for many social and economic activities, including income maintenance, economic dependency, savings, fertility, migration, social welfare and social adjustment, etc. Very broadly speaking, the family or household has two different aspects in relation to the process of population ageing. First, the family itself undergoes its transformation by demographic changes through the ageing process. Secondly, the family as a small group serves as buffer to its members to lessen the social and economic impact of population ageing superimposed upon it as if from outside before reaching individual members. The present chapter deals mainly with the former aspect, but consideration is also given to the latter.
Population ageing has very important bearings on the changes in the number and structure of the family and household. Let us first discuss how much population ageing is attributed to determine the size of the family and household. Then, an attempt is made to look into the course of transformation in which dynamics in population ageing affect the structure of the family and household. Here the term "structure" mainly means the composition of the household by family type and patterns of co-living of the elderly with their offsprings.
