It's important to appreciate this fully. In Japanese culture, the situation was actually different. If you insulted your host, he was rather likely to kill you. If a foreigner visited a Japanese home in those days, he needed to stipulate that he wished not to be killed, even if he should inadvertantly offer a deadly insult. Japanese culture standardized the implicit contract that you were wililng to be beheaded for violation of various mores--but you could, by agreement, refuse to enter into that implicit contract. American culture standardizes the opposite assumption.
Note: of course Japanese culture was far from libertarian. In general, persons of lower social class could not opt out of a beheading by someone of higher social class. They had social contracts too, you see.
“It's important to appreciate this fully.”
Agreed.
“They had social contracts too, you see.”
Agreed. And the Social Contract they had then was different from the one they have now and different from our’s.
(Ummm, I seem to have suddenly lost track of what we’ve been arguing about.)