Abstract: Nagai Kafu's silent resistance during the war actually retained his consistent critical posture toward the civilization and politics of “Modern Japan.” Kafu's The Diary of Heartbroken Pavilion documents his sharp criticism of the customs and social conditions in Japan during the Taisho and Showa periods. His criticism has two implicit dimensions. First, since the start of the modern times, the intermingling of urban and rural populations and the changes of urban culture made Kafu, the adherent of the Shogunate period, feel uncomfortable. Moreover, the rise of the popular culture and the ups and downs of the revolutionary movement brought him so much disgust and fear that he had to retreat to a reclusive life. His reliance on the former sages in the Edo period as his navigation light implies that his seclusion is no more than his helplessness and passive defiance under the strong political pressure. Secondly, Kafu reiterated the significant impact of political incidents, such as the “February Twenty-Sixth Incident,” on the change of folk customs. He regarded the party corruption, the warlords' tyranny, and the personal awakening as three maladies of “modern Japan,” identifying the last one as the root cause of the other two. In the meantime, he not only ignored the strong function of the political system in shaping up the social order, the way of life, and folk customs from top to bottom, but also failed to reveal the mutual restraint and fluctuating power relations among various factions within the national system under the Japanese emperor as well as the dynamic uncertainty that would consequently occur. For this reason, he couldn't figure out the historical process of Modern Japan's downfall and the origin of its politics and ideology.

Key words: Nagai Kafu, The Diary of Heartbroken Pavilion, “Modern Japan”, criticism of civilization, political criticism