Summary - This paper deals with the modernization process in Japan during the Meiji Restoration.  We can consider the facts of the period between 1853 and 1912 as a modernization process or as a case in Westernalization, but in this paper I try to demonstrate the gradual passage from the isolation and particularistic attitude of the Edo period to the more open and international mind that the end of the Meiji period showed to the whole world.  In fact, while the Tokugawa bakufu took into isolation the country for more than 250 years, in 1853 US Commodore Mattew C.Perry compelled the shogunate to open some ports to  Western ships eager to commerce. The history of Japan is a sequence of contacts and of insularity, from the beginning of Japanese history to the present.  The period at the end of the Tokugawa shogunate is the last period of internal development and of autonomous generation of values and innovation in the field of political and socio-economic identity, by which the Japanese people took consciousness of a national strength based on self-realization.  The Meiji period can be seen as a period of self-development, and the modernization process has been a way to westernize and to become a world political power. The high need for achievement of the Meiji-era Japanese can be observed by the large success of books like Samuel Smiles’s “Self Help”, read by over one million readers. The characteristic of Japanese culture to accumulate diverse elements is clearly visible still today.