One-time hospitality is pure gift, not an investment in reciprocity

Evidence

In Shizuko Go’s Requiem, a painfully beautiful novel about the destruction of a vast web of social relationships in Japan through wartime deaths in the last months of World War II, the heroine Setsuko is entertained by an older woman whom she has never met before and is unlikely ever to see again. She recalls “the familiar precept of perfect hospitality: ‘We meet but once’” (Go 1985, 107). There is strategic subtlety in this bit of popular wisdom. If I know we meet but once, my hospitality is not an initial move in a potential trust or exchange relationship. It does not encapsulate your interest in reciprocity over the long run. It is purely a gift or an expression of my hospitable character. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 817

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how encapsulated-interest trust differs from pure gift-giving: hospitality toward a stranger one meets but once cannot encapsulate long-run reciprocity.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the stated reading purpose: this shows where Luhmannian familiarity/trust ends and pure norm-governed gift behavior begins, complementing the blindness->monitoring collapse chain. — connects to: Modern efficiency erases the ceremonious generosity that once defined luxury travel