This article offers an analysis of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows, whose content and authorial intention have long been the subject of scholarly debate. A brief review of the existing literature reveals the diversity of interpretations of the essay and allows for the hypothesis that Tanizaki’s text is a narrative of cultural resistance. This hypothesis is substantiated through an examination of the socio-historical and cultural-political contexts of early twentieth-century Japan. The study is conducted within the theoretical frameworks of postcolonial studies, identity theory, imagology, and contextual analysis. Particular attention is paid to the conditions under which the text was produced, the crisis of identity experienced by Japanese society during the period of Western cultural dominance, and the place of In Praise of Shadows within public discourse in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. The aim of this article is to clarify J. Tanizaki’s authorial intention and to examine the authorial strategy he adopts. The proposed interpretation makes it possible to view In Praise of Shadows as a reaction to the cultural colonization of Japan and as an attempt to decolonize Japanese ways of thinking. The findings of the study suggest that In Praise of Shadows constitutes an important part of a substantial corpus of texts produced by Japanese writers in the first third of the twentieth century as a form of cultural resistance.