Abstrakt
Watsuji Tetsurô's (和辻哲郎, 1889-1960) theory of fûdo (風土) as a "cultural climate" conceptualizes an "interrelatedness" (間柄) of humanity and milieu as inseparable and mutually determining. Watsuji tends to view fûdo as stable within a particular culture.
However, the unfolding process of globalization as a homogenizing element undermines human attachment to physical space, as well as cultural and national differences, which seems to be a prerequisite of Watsuji's concept of fûdo. Thus it may seem that it tells us little about the ethics of inter-relationality between human being and his milieu in the context of globalizing world of globalization.
In the present paper, it is my intention to examine the possibility of application Watsuji's concept of "cultural climate" in the framework of globalizing world by means of the "interrelatedness". I contend that the "interrelatedness", as a fundamental structure of human being within fûdo, embraces an ethical insight that enables Watsuji's view to shift from a theory of climatic (or national) characters, as it is often perceived to be, to an approach to cohabitation within a rapidly changing environment of a shared milieu.