The world is a massively multiplayer role playing game.
Many years ago, I, as an adult visiting Tokyo, saw a building with many pianos — a piano shop. I went inside, saw no employee, so I walked around, looked around, then sat down and played the biggest concert grand. When I looked up, half a dozen store employees, all men, surrounded me at a polite distance. Reading the room, I thought they treated my presence as a “security situation.” Turned out I wondered into one of their special rooms presumably reserved for artist recording (I could not be sure due to language barrier), and I was politely invited/escorted to another room — also with many marvelous grand pianos — a showroom where visitors are allowed to play the pianos.
Would have been a cuter story in my memory had I been a six year old, though my parents/legal guardians may have had a big scare for having lost a kid in Tokyo.
The New Yorker dude’s story might have ended up in a police report instead of the New Yorker had he looked like a delinquent teenager, the sort the princess-like woman would clutch her purse in his presence and call the cops.