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Watsuji Tetsuro's Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan. By Watsuji Tetsuro. Translated by Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert E. Carter. With an Introduction and Interpretive Essay by Robert E. Carter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 381.
Watsuji Tetsuro (1889-1960), one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century Japanese thought, has rarely received extensive attention from scholars outside Japan. Indeed, interested readers of English have had to rely on a translation of a single one of his works, A Climate, and on a handful of interpretive essays scattered across several decades.' This is not too surprising: Watsuji's oeuvre is complex, disparate, and, owing to his association with the Kyoto School, controversial. In Japan, evaluations of his work have typically split sharply along left/right lines. A younger generation of scholars, however, has begun to view Watsuji in several new lights, as, for example, a foundational formulator of the culturalist approach to Japanese identity and a quasi-postmodern appreciator of the malleability of individual selfhood. Clearly, the time has come for Western scholars of modern Asian thought, too, to reckon carefully with his multifarious legacy.
The work to which Watsuji devoted his greatest intellectual labors was a threevolume series titled Rinrigaku, that is, "ethics." This is the work that co-translators Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert E. Carter purport to offer English readers in their book of the same title. However, as Carter hastily notes, well into his Introduction to...