Abstract
Watsuji Tetsurō (和辻哲郎, 1889-1960) was one of the most seminal thinkers of a reflective phase of Japanese philosophy. His work Climate: An Anthropological Study (Fūdo: ningengakuteki kōsatsu 風土・人間学的考察), which was published in 1935, deals with the relationship between humans and their environment.
This work is accompanied with various misinterpretations. Among others, it was misunderstood as advocating geographical determinism.
This kind of misunderstanding stems from confusion of "climate" (fūdo 風土) and natural environment (shizen kankyō自然環境), even though Watsuji himself very explicitly denied such an interpretation in the preface of Fūdo. In the preface, he asserts that his study is not concerned with the way how the natural environment influences human being.
He defined the "climate" (fūdo) as "the structural moment of human existence." As such, it is utterly different from the natural environment (shizen kankyō). In this regard, Watsuji's theory establishes a solid basis for environmental ethics that is concerned with the relationship between humans and their shared environment.
In my paper, I discuss Watsuji's concept of fūdo, which has an indisputable place in cultural geography, in terms of its role as a framework for the relationship between humans and their shared milieu. My research is based on an assumption that Watsuji's ethical concept of betweenness (aidagara 間柄), as defined in Fūdo, provides his approach to the natural environment with ethical dimension and unlocks the new layers of intimacy between environment and human being.