If an older person doesn’t have a whole lot going on, they often look forward to these sorts of routine daily interactions. Missing one could easily be a red flag.
if the older person wants it, yes. On the other hand "welfare check" in lots of areas is a justification to break rules of privacy and it is increasing.
This article starts with an obviously disturbing topic - dying alone as an elderly person. Yet the Japanese are super nosy people with very little privacy in my experience there. Somehow, there are customs that are deeper around privacy that are not obvious.. and perhaps a growing society that is not changing well.
Expectation of privacy, territory and associated manners and legal actions.. are being examined here. The wildly-downvoted comment stands.
Driving along the (not gated) driveway of a home, walking around the perimeter of the property (which did not have a privacy fence, the legal terms here are "curtilage", public right of way, and easement) and hearing a cry for help and acting on it are not an invasion of privacy.
All of this was of course, a long time ago, and a further consideration was that the family whose phone was used were on a party line with the neighbor in question and specifically mentioned that a phone call for that neighbor went unanswered the previous evening which added some urgency to the matter.
If anything, Japan has a culture of privacy and respect of individuals which make this originally noted societal problem more likely.
