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Examining the relation between geography and history, the founding father of the French school of human geography, Paul Vidal de La Blache (1845-1918), defined it in 1913 as “a science of places, not of humans”. On the other hand, the Japanese philosopher WATSUJI Tetsurô (1889-1960), in a codicil to the second edition of Fûdo (Milieux, 1935), recognized that his mesology (fûdoron) would have benefited from Vidal’s conception of geography, but that it would not have changed the principles of his own theory. While referring to Jakob von UEXKÜLL’s (1864-1944) mesology (Umweltlehre) and to NISHIDA Kitarô’s (1870-1945) “logic of place” (basho no ronri), one questions here Vidal’s and Watsuji’s respective conceptions of place and environment, and shows what followed the intellectual synergy which Watsuji thus initiated.