Offspring of Watsuji's theory of milieu (F^udo)

Abstract

Watsuji Tetsuro (1889–1960), a Japanese philosopher, published in 1935 Fudo: ningengakuteki kosatsu, an essay on the relationship between the character of human societies and the natural conditions of their environment, mainly climate. This book has generally been understood as an illustration of geographical determinism, to which belong indeed some of the main supporters of Watsuji's theory. Yet Watsuji himself stated explicitly that his book was not about the influence of the natural environment on human life, but about ‘the structural moment of human existence’, in which the matter is milieu (fudo) and mediance (fudosei), not environment (kankyo), and which has much in common with Heidegger's Dasein, although Watsuji contests the Heideggerian precedence of temporality on spatiality. In this respect, Fudo is the forerunner of a promising trend in cultural geography: studies on the geographical constitution of Being, opening the way to a recosmization of the human.