"In Rinrigaku, Watsuji argues that ethics is the study of what it means for us to be human. How we think about the nature of human existence, he says, dictates the ways in which we understand our ethical values. Hence, he criticises Western philosophical conceptions of the modern subject, arguing that the Western rendering of subjectivity is both problematic and foreign"
"In 1934, Watsuji laid out the methodological foundation of Japanese ethics with his Ethics as the Study of the Human [ ningen], and gave the earliest formulation of Japanese environmental ethics in Fūdo (1935) - translated as Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study. He then published his magnum opus, Rinrigaku - translated as Watsuji Tetsurō's Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan - which was originally a series of essays written between 1937 and 1949, during one of the most tumultuous periods for modern Japan"
Watsuji Tetsurō analyzed intellectual history and ethical thought and pioneered existentialism studies in Japan with early works on Friedrich Nietzsche and the first Japanese book on Søren Kierkegaard. He engaged critically with Western thinkers such as Hegel and Heidegger. In 1934 he established a methodological foundation for Japanese ethics and in 1935 articulated an early Japanese environmental ethics in Fūdo. He composed Rinrigaku between 1937 and 1949, arguing that ethics studies what it means to be human and that conceptions of subjectivity shape ethical understanding. He critiques Western individualistic, self-referential subjectivity as incompatible with East Asian notions of ningen.
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