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 Western European past in order to articulate the continuing desire of the Japanese nation in the present for the historical phenomenon of Western modernity projected into the future as an ideal to which to aspire.
As a particular expression of the shōjo Gothic style, Kuroshitsuji suggests that there may be two more paradoxes to explore. As a shōjo Gothic text, Kuroshitsuji appropriates and reinvents the signs of a Western European past not only to fetishize an idealized Western European aristocratic taste and lifestyle and the ideal of Western cultural modernity the former symbolizes. It does so also for the counterhegemonic purpose of articulating and affirming a “Japanese" form of (post)modernity that emerges out of capitalist globalization, the formation of a global consumer culture, and the consequent privileging of a different form of cultural capital: namely, the ability to hybridize different cultures that "flow" across national boundaries through the processes of simulation, recontextualization, and reinscription, and to export these hybrid cultural commodities for global consumption.

In other words, the shōjo Gothic style in Kuroshitsuji intervenes in its own idealization of Western cultural modernity to celebrate contemporary Japan's possession of this form of cultural capital that is manifested in the shōjo Gothic style itself. However, in doing so, it participates in Nihonjinron discourses and superflat theory's jingoistic affirmation of the Japanese "Self" as unique, essential, proto-postmodern, and superior to the Western "Other," while neglecting to recognize that the shōjo Gothic style is an enunciative practice of cultural hybridity that, in its construction of post-colonial Japanese national identity, actually subverts the Japan/West binary opposition. As Bhabha argues in The Location of Culture, the act of "translating" the signs of a foreign culture changes the boundaries of both the translated and the translating cultures, thereby producing a liminal hybrid that eludes the polarization of "East" and "West," "Self" and "Other."