title: Watsuji Tetsuro's Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan (SUNY series in Modern Japanese Philosophy)
author: Watsuji Tetsuro
description: Robert Carter and Yamamoto Seisaku have produced a wonderfully clear and lucid translation of Watsuji Tetsuros masterpiece, Rinrigaku. Long known by comparative philosophers as a centerpiece of modern Japanese philosophical tradition, Rinrigaku has been made accessible now to Western students and scholars. For anyone who is a serious student of Heidegger, this work is a must read!  David Edward Shaner, Furman University<br><br>Here we have a major treatise by a sophisticated thinker who self-consciously wished to provide a distinctly "Asian" alternative to Western ethical systemssystems he and others saw as conceptually flawed and culturally ethnocentric. Long-suppressed questions about the assumed universalizability of some of the Wests most privileged moral modes are posed in and through this work. The study both of comparative ethics and of comparative societies will necessarily be much enriched and enlivened by it.  From the Foreword by William R. LaFleur
zlib_text: A CLIMATE 
  A Philosophical Study 
  by 
  WATSUJI TETSURO 
  translated by 
  GEOFFREY BOWNAS 
  Lecturer, Oxford University 
  Published by 
  PRINTING 
  BUREAU, 
  JAPANESE GOVERNMENT 
  
  Unesco, at the 9th session of its General Conference held 
  in New Delhi in 1956, decided to launch the Major Project on 
  the Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural 
  Values. 
  In accordance with this decision this Commission has been 
  carrying on since 1958, within the framework of the project, 
  a programme of publishing modern Japanese philosophical works 
  into foreign languages. 
  In 1959, we put out an English translation of "The Ways 
  of Thinking of Eastern Peoples" by Nakamura Hajime; and in 
  1960 " A  Study of Good" by Nishida Kitaro. 
  The present 7101- 
  ume, "A Climate" by Watsuji Tetsuro, is the third of the series 
  and is to be followed in 1962 by an English version of "Time 
  and Eternity" by Hatano Seiichi. 
  Watsuji Tetsuro, one of the foremost scholars in the field 
  of ethics in Japan, attempted i