What country is this quote referring to:

In a culture that stresses the need to pull one’s own weight, a
profound stigma surrounds welfare. Many needy elderly are too ashamed
even to apply for it. Advocacy groups for the aged estimate that the
number of seniors in need is at least five times more than the
half-million now receiving special government assistance.

   Pull  your own weight; stigma of welfare; shame of government assistance: sounds like an idealized image of the "rugged individualism" of the US (which, of course, does not capture the realities of US society either.)  But no, the passage is from a story in today’s Washington Post,"The Face of Poverty Ages in Rapidly Graying Japan."  It seems rather familiar: social attitudes, among both the young and the old, toward caring for the elderly are changing, leaving more and more old folks with no one to care for them and with an embarrassed resistance against asking for help.   Moreover, the government, in an effort to reduce deficit spending and create a more competitive business sector, is cutting back on welfare for the aged:

As the world’s most rapidly graying nation struggles to cope with
the exploding costs of its aging population, it is cutting back its
famed safety net of universal health care, generous pensions and
welfare benefits for seniors of all social classes. But those already
living on the margins are being hit the hardest.

Over the past
decade, the number of indigent seniors nationwide skyrocketed by 183
percent to about half a million people, Welfare Ministry statistics
show. Most of them are victims of the protracted recession that Japan
endured in the ’90s, and many have been abandoned by children bucking
the Japanese tradition of living with one’s elderly parents.

The
creation of a new underclass of the down, out and old in Japan — a
country that long prided itself on being a "one-class society" — is
giving public housing complexes the feel of poor retirement
communities. Almost one in every two people on welfare in Japan is now
65 or older, the government here reports. By comparison, roughly one in
10 welfare recipients in the United States are senior citizens,
according to U.S. government statistics.

    If there were any analytic utility to the notion "Confucian society," it would most likely be found in how a society, and its government, manages the issue of care for the elderly, a primary Confucian duty.  Not too long age – and I suspect still right now – books with the title Confucius Lives Next Door, seemed to capture something about Japanese society.    And there still might be some truth to the contention that Japan embodies certain values of collectivism that can be traced back to its historical experience with Confucianism.  But modernization and globalization are taking their toll.  If the plight of the elderly in Japan is as this article describes, than that society is rapidly losing its Confucian qualities.

    I do not mean this as a knock against Japan – it is not clear to me that any place now can be rightly termed a "Confucian society."  Rather, it demonstrates, perhaps, what Confucianism cannot be: it cannot be a set of social practices that fundamentally contradict the cultural individualization of globalized modernity.  Confucianism might serve as a guide for how individuals can make good decisions and find meaning in a modern society, but it cannot rise to the level of defining a whole society in itself.   It can operate on an individual level, not a societal level.

     Or am I wrong about all of this?