Ever since the opening of the country by an American squadron in 1853–4 and the subsequent modernization process during the Meiji era, historians and social scientists have been searching for a grand theory that helps to explain why — among Asian countries — it was Japan first (and for a long time Japan alone) that was able to follow in the footsteps of Western capitalism. Observers from abroad have been tempted to call this process a success story, and nowadays Western and Japanese books dealing with this 'success' are filling the libraries. Yet even after decades of research, it seems that there is no consensus among scholars about the social and cultural ingredients of this modernization process.