 In the Preface to Climate and Culture, Watsuji states that when we come to consider both the natural and the human cultural climate in which we find ourselves, we render both nature and culture as “already objectified, with the result that we find ourselves examining the relation between object and object, and there is no link with subjective human existence” (Watsuji 1961, v). Watsuji distinguishes his interpretation of fūdo, “literally ‘Wind and Earth’ in Japanese” (Watsuji 1961, 1) from what he maintained was its then conventional understanding simply as a term used for natural environment — something that is a resource to be used, or an object separate from or merely alongside our being-in-the-world. The phenomena of climate must be seen “as expressions of subjective human existence and not of natural environment” (Watsuji 1961, v). He explains this using the example of the phenomenon of cold, a single climatic feature. Ordinarily, we think of ‘us’ and ‘coldness’ as objectively distinct and separate from us. Phenomenologically, however, we only come to know that it is cold after we actually feel it as cold. Coldness does not press upon us from the outside; rather, we are already out in the cold. As Heidegger emphasized, we ‘ex-istere’ outside of ourselves, and in this case, in the cold. It is not the cold which is outside of us, but we who are already out in the cold. And we feel this cold in common with other people. We all talk about the weather. To existere, then, means that we experience the cold with other ‘I’s. We experience coldness within ourselves, with others, and “in relation to the soil, the topographic and scenic features and so on of a given land” (Watsuji 1961, 5). In a telling, and poetically adept passage, he writes that a cold wind may be experienced as a sharp mountain blast, or a dry wind sweeping through a city at the end of winter, or “the spring breeze may be one which blows off cherry blossoms or which caresses the waves” (Watsuji 1961, 5). All weather is as much ‘subjective’ as it is ‘objective.’ 