> It’s their right to decide how they perceive being approached by a stranger.

Okay, I suppose everyone is entitled to their own delusions. But believing that initiating a conversation with a stranger is stalking or assault is just false.

> The culture in my country never really had many “public conversations” from one stranger to another. This is something that has been noted by foreign travelers for generations now, at least back to the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries.

How then do people come to know each other in the first place? Every familiar person has been a stranger at some point.

> They definitely do. This has already been mentioned by various people from different countries in this thread.

I read one of my home country (saying that you would get arrested if you did this) and I assure you it is false.