Law, philosophy and religion

Abstract

There are contrastingly few works in these fields in Soviet studies of Japan: this will be a short chapter. To begin with the legal profession, there is only one person listed by Miliband (1975) as a ‘jurist’ in connection with Japan; namely L. M. Gudoshnikov, who has dealt principally with China and published only one special item on Japan — a large study of its penitentiary system (Gudoshnikov and Savel’yev, 1968). He was born in Petrozavodsk (a place in North European Russia that has produced more than one Orientalist) and graduated in the Law Faculty of the Institute of Foreign Trade. He proceeded to a master’s degree in 1953 with a thesis on law courts in the People’s Republic of China and eventually to a doctorate in law with a thesis on the State structure of that country. (In the Soviet Union ‘State and Law’ are a unitary subject, the law is an organ of the State and Western concepts concerning personality, equity, contract, common law, habeas corpus or the like do not arise.) Thus Japan in this facet of its national life is here presented to the Soviet readership principally in the light of its punitive code, its system of prisons and enforcements. Gudoshnikov has also written about Sri Lanka. The other point of interest here is that he is a strict upholder of Leninist principles; in another joint work (with B. N. Topornin in 1971) he dealt again severely with Communist China in 24 pages on ‘The left-opportunist revision of the teachings of Lenin on the State’, part of a book on Lenin and the Problems of Contemporary China.