Just finished this series on Audible. Very good, fairly comprehensive and you will pick up a lot of history in oft neglected regions in university level History of Civilization courses. Broad overviews of Japan, China and Korea were enlightening.

I'll put my stake in the ground: 1853-1900 is the answer to your question.

tl:dr;

History and the nature of the Japanese Emperor has a lot to do with the answer to your question. First, Japan is an Empire. Always has been and in some ways, still is today. Unlike Kings/Queens in the West, the Japanese Emperor is a descendant of the Sun God Amaterasu (not just a political ruler appointed by a religious class of people as in the rest of the world). Up, until the end of WWII, this is exactly what the bulk of the Japanese population believed through its long history. Inclusive in the deification of the Emperor, and the Shinto mythology of the creation of the world, came the logical conclusion that Japanese people were superior to all other races. This last thought would cost Japan WWII as their military thought that the Japanese fighting spirit alone could win them the war against the US and the Allies, but I digress...

During the Tokugawa (Edo) period (not too long after the warring states period) the class system in Japan wasn't focused on abroad as Japan was closed off for almost 300 years from the rest of the world, but focused on rice production--which requires a hierarchical government due to land and water requirements. From the Shogun down to the lowly rice paddy laborer, focus was on rice production and maintaining a closed door policy. Also, during this period, Japan maintained its feudal classes (Shi-No-Ko-Sho) and regional leaders (Dimyo) had to have part of their families in Edo (Tokyo) as hostages to the government which kept the peace.

Therefore, during sakkoku (closed door policy), there wasn't a need for 'nationalism' as the population was fully under the control of its samurai overlords. It wasn't until the Meiji period--after the US insisted at gunpoint-- that Japan finally opened their markets to the West and Japan started to modernize its entire society. The Emperor Meiji was at the heart of this decision and small scale civil wars/conflicts ensued, but after just a few decades, Japan emerged on the international scene. My brief sentences here do not do this transformation justice. It is called the Meiji Restoration because the power was moved from the Tokugawa Shogunate to the Emperor Meiji, but they should have called it the Meiji Revolution as it transformed Japanese society from pre-industrialization to contemporary modernization. Japan, for the next 50 years, learned and benefited tremendously from the West and became a 'modernized' economy--on par or surpassing comparably sized countries in the West. This also meant that Japan was out in the world diplomatically.

Fast forward less than 50 years after Matthew Perry forced Japan to open, Japan was more-or-less modern enough that in the early 1900s, Japan went to war with Russia and beat the Russian's soundly in Manchuria and the Sea of Japan. From the signing of the Portsmouth Treaty ending this war (for which Teddy Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating this treaty).

Interested if someone has a different take.

In the paranoid years of the Cold War, countries had to either be aligned either to the West (US, NATO, Japan, Australia, etc.) or East (Soviet Union or Eastern Block Countries). In the 1950's, Iran voted in Mosadeq--who wanted to nationalize oil production for the benefit of Iran rather than BP's shareholders. With the help of the CIA Mosadeq was ousted and the Shah was installed. The Shah plundered Iran, and the secret police were everywhere. I think the biggest thing that Iranian's were feeling was 'Yay, we got rid of the Shah' and were very optimistic for independence from being a Cold War pawn. Unfortunately, the student's taking US Embassy workers hostage and the return of Kohemeni (and his hardline views) did not have the 'silver lining' that many Iranians still want today.

I don't know about architectural archeology. To me the most important technology transfer (to use the modern vernacular) was 'movable type' which was invented by the Chinese a long time before Guttenberg. The technology of putting characters together on a press and inking them onto paper, only got to Europe due to Genghis Khan and the Mongolians--who have--similar to latin languages, a fixed number of characters in their writing(i.e. A-Z). The Chinese have close to 30,000 characters in their written language--making movable type not practical for Chinese, but as the Mongolians swept across the Asian Steppe to Europe, creating the largest continuous 'country' in the world's history (from China to the Mediterranean Sea, knowledge in Europe about the Mogols spread to the West. It is not surprising that paper making techniques perfected in China, quickly replaced hand painted/printed text on vellum (thinned out leather) as wood pulp was much more available (and sustainable) than to kill 1 animal for just a few pages of text.

There are archeological sites in Mali (West Africa) that had Persian and even Chinese artifacts were found dating a long ways back showing that trade routes though not as extensive as later silk road and later times, but still existed as humans traveled further back than was thought.

It's too bad Alexandria's library was destroyed in the Roman days as it was THE largest library ever made and had tens of thousands of papyrus scrolls going back hundreds of years and in my opinion, along with the Holocaust is one of the most impactful tragedies in human history.

Fun fact. Bay Leaves (cooking herb) are a fragrant, flavorful species of laurel.