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A prime example of this was Photographs of Japanese Customs and Manners by K. Ogawa, Photographer, Tokyo, Japan.

To capitalize on this surge of interest, books on the depiction of life in Japan began to be produced from the 1870s onward.

Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room is James McNeill Whistler's masterpiece of interior decorative mural art, located in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He painted the paneled room in a rich and unified palette of brilliant blue-greens with over-glazing and metallic gold leaf. Painted between 1876–77, it now is considered one of the greatest surviving aesthetic interiors, and best examples of the Anglo-Japanese style.

This led to the establishment of Japonisme, best exemplified in the art of James McNeil Whistler, whose society models were often depicted in kimonos.

However the gradual thawing of diplomatic relationships led to an influx of Japanese arts to Europe and America. Prints by the great Edo period printmakers such as Utamaro, Hokusai and Hiroshige began to be imported in vast quantities.

In the late 19th Century Japan was often referred to as a ‘sealed book’.

This is vividly portrayed in the movie Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise.The film achieved higher box office receipts in Japan than in the United States.

The Boshin War (Boshin Sensō, "War of the Year of the Yang Earth Dragon"),sometimes known as the Japanese Revolution, was a civil war in Japan, fought from 1868 to 1869 between forces of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate and those seeking to return political power to the Imperial Court.

After 1635 and the introduction of Seclusion laws, inbound ships were only allowed from China, Korea, and the Netherlands. This had the effect of isolating Japan from unwanted outside influence until the Meiji restoration which followed in 1868. Japan turned down a demand from the United States, which was greatly expanding its own presence in the Asia-Pacific region, to establish diplomatic relations when Commodore James Biddle appeared in Edo Bay with two warships in July 1846.

It is at the beginning of the Edo period that Japan built its first ocean-going Western-style warships, such as the San Juan Bautista, a 500-ton galleon-type ship that transported a Japanese embassy headed by Hasekura Tsunenaga to the Americas and then to Europe.

Though Tokugawa Ieyasu took three more years to consolidate his position of power over the Toyotomi clan and the daimyōs, but Sekigahara is widely considered to be the unofficial beginning of the Tokugawa bakufu, the last shogunate to control Japan. A not exactly unbiased historian wrote in 1664 "Evil-doers and bandits were vanquished and the entire realm submitted to Lord Ieyasu, praising the establishment of peace and extolling his martial virtue. That this glorious era that he founded may continue for ten thousands upon ten thousands of generations, coeval with heaven and earth." The Tokugawa shogunate ruled from Edo Castle and the years of the shogunate became known as the Edo period. The period was characterized by economic growth, strict social order, isolationist foreign policies, a stable population, "no more wars", and popular enjoyment of arts and culture.