The Meiji Restoration of Japan.

The name that the Japanese gave to their land is Nihon (“sun origin”), which heavily reflects their belief that all Japanese are descendents of the Sun Goddess. The Japanese had consciously closed the door to outside intervention because they felt they had nothing good to learn from the barbaric people of the west, they may have been right; Over the 250 years that the Japanese practiced a closed door policy with the west, they enjoyed relative peace, prosperity, and advancement of the arts. By the 1820’s the Samurai class in Japan had become aware of foreign military might through the word of those who had traveled abroad. (Some Japanese found their way around the world upon foreign fishing boats.) Even some government aids such as Mizuno Tadakuni who had studied Dutch gunnery and English Industry in the 1840’s warned the Shogun of European advances; Mizuno prescribed a system of Eastern Ethics with Western Technology.