The idealization of Western cultural modernity in Kuroshitsuji (and in other postwar Japanese popular culture texts that manifest the shōjo Gothic style) articulates the enduring desire of contemporary Japan to "catch up" with the West and become fully "modern" in Western terms. This desire can be traced back to the final Tokugawa years (1853-67) and the Meiji era (1868-1912), which constituted the turning point in Japan's history when the country first came into contact with Western imperial power in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
In the years before and during the Meiji era, Western artifacts and customs, and the aesthetic disposition or "taste" these artifacts and customs implied, became objects of idolization. According to Kitahara Michio, this "Europeanization fever" (ōkanetsu) was the cultural expression of Japan's Oedipal identification with the West in response to the "shock" of possible colonization (which Kitahara reads as castration) engendered by the arrival of Commodore Perry's warships in 1853 and, I would argue, by the increasing awareness of the realities of international geopolitics in the years that followed.
The Japanese public's almost fanatic desire to possess both Western goods and the Western knowledge needed to consume and appreciate these goods led to intense interest in Western languages, art, apparel, hairstyles, and even the eating of beef. The Meiji writer Natsume Sōseki observed that "men would show off by dangling gold watches, wearing Western dress, growing beards, and interjecting English phrases when speaking ordinary Japanese." Japanese art and culture, on the other hand, were seen as inferior and treated with contempt. For example, woodblock prints by prominent artists were used to wrap fish and vegetables. As I have shown, Japanese identification with Western cultural modernity as a national ideal-I" first arose out of Japan's traumatic historical encounter with Western imperialism just before and during the Meiji period; as the product of that traumatic encounter, it has arguably become rooted in the collective unconscious of the Japanese nation and finds expression today in Kuroshitsuji and other shōjo Gothic texts.
The shōjo Gothic style, as we have seen, is a signifying practice that involves a number of paradoxes. As a postmodern practice of simulation, recontextualization and reinscription, the shōjo Gothic style ironically idealizes the modern. It nostalgically fictionalizes a
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