To clarify, I’m mostly saying that lots of cultures do lots of things.
For example, there are places where significant chunks of the economy are based on elaborate, competitive gifts of pigs. There are places where if someone admires the best fish you caught today, you have to give it to them. (And if this rule is abused constantly, you still can’t say “no”. Violence, however, might be culturally permissible.) There are a lot of cultures which customarily give cash gifts in situations where people in the US would find it tacky.
But the specific case of “cash gifts as apologies for inconvenience” is actually murkier than I expected. There are a few Japanese customs that are mentioned in passing in English-language sources. Spending 20 minutes with Google Translate does find examples like this, which discusses various forms of non-business compensation, and distinguishes between “actual expenses” and supplementary money used to indicate apology:
If you’re unsure about the amount, it’s common to include a few thousand yen as an apology for the inconvenience caused, in addition to the actual expenses that need to be reimbursed.
All the sources I can find on these traditions suggest that cash compensation for inconvenience is a social minefield, and that if it’s seen as “buying someone off” insincerely, it may backfire.
(Other traditions, like weregild and diya, don’t really fit this framework, because they involve things like death, disability, and/or trying to prevent good old-fashioned blood feuds.)
To clarify, I’m mostly saying that lots of cultures do lots of things.
For example, there are places where significant chunks of the economy are based on elaborate, competitive gifts of pigs. There are places where if someone admires the best fish you caught today, you have to give it to them. (And if this rule is abused constantly, you still can’t say “no”. Violence, however, might be culturally permissible.) There are a lot of cultures which customarily give cash gifts in situations where people in the US would find it tacky.
But the specific case of “cash gifts as apologies for inconvenience” is actually murkier than I expected. There are a few Japanese customs that are mentioned in passing in English-language sources. Spending 20 minutes with Google Translate does find examples like this, which discusses various forms of non-business compensation, and distinguishes between “actual expenses” and supplementary money used to indicate apology:
All the sources I can find on these traditions suggest that cash compensation for inconvenience is a social minefield, and that if it’s seen as “buying someone off” insincerely, it may backfire.
(Other traditions, like weregild and diya, don’t really fit this framework, because they involve things like death, disability, and/or trying to prevent good old-fashioned blood feuds.)