police and publish the names of the offending companies. The Employees' Pension Insurance Act stipulates a prison term of up to six months or a fine of up to 500,000 yen for any violator of the law, but the law has rarely been applied. Social Problems with pension system Under the national pension plan, a wife who earns less than 1.30 million yen ($13,000) annually has not had to pay for any type of pension plan but has been entitled to receive a pension as a dependent of her employed husband. In other words, the pension system works to the advantage of full-time housewives, who receive survivors’ benefits without ever having contributed to the National Pension fund. This has led to complaints from working women that it is unfair that women who have not contributed to pension, receive money from pension fund. The problem we have in the Japanese Pension system is that it is based on the traditional conservative family(the man is working, the woman is not working and is taking care of the children). The amount of national pension people who are older than 65(who did full contribution) can get is 779,300JPY/ year, which is not enough by normal living standards. Usually, people combine both corporate pension and national pension to survive. However, since corporate pension is not always available, there are growing number of the elderly on welfare due to insufficient amount of pension money received. The rate of relative poverty for the over 65 age group is 21% while the OECD average is 13% (2007). So this Japanese system of elderly dependent on both national pension and corporate pension has led to an increase in relative poverty as some of them do not have access to corporate pension. Lastly, Japan is facing an aging population. In 1975—1980, the fertility rate in Japan was 1.83 children per woman (OECD average − 2.26). In the period of 2005-2010, the fertility rate fell to 1.27 (average of OECD – 1.69). At the same time, Japan’s life expectancy (at the retirement age) in 2010 was 19.8 years for men (OECD average − 18.5 years) and according to the demographic projections, life expectancy in Japan will increase up to 21.6 years for men. In other words, as the working population is forecasted to shrink further, Japan’s pension system will rely on a smaller base of contributors. And there will be more