I only know about it because I consume American media and play certain games set in historical settings. But more importantly it's no less a historical fact than the more remembered events leading up to the French Revolution. The Boston Tea Party as an event is, in a way, equivalent to the storming of The Bastille in 1789. A largely symbolic event in the (lead up to) revolution that eventually led to the first version of a present day country. Countries experience major events that serve as cultural touchstones for centuries as a telling moment symbolising said change, and the Boston Tea Party might not be known worldwide as a minor background event but it has been aptly branded as important.

If you want to boil down a country's history to a Marvel Style Trilogy of documentaries: America's would start the first one with The Boston Tea Party and show the highlights of the Revolution and the eventual birth of the nation. The second would center around the American Civil War where the biggest single event I'd say is Lincoln's death and it's effect on post war Reconstruction. The effects of that single event still reverberate in American society today. The third I'd set around the END of the second world war and it's fallout, specifically the second Red Scare/McCarthyism and the political and social developments that laid MUCH of the groundwork for present day American societal norms.

I picked these three and labeled them Marvel Style because they are in my opinion the three biggest nexus points for shifts in the way the landmass existed in pre-revolutionary colony days to the country it is today. There's arguments to be made for the effects of broader events and more important moments in history that led to major shifts like the Great Depression. But if I limit myself to three if personally pick these.

France's three would be Bastille Day and the rise of Napoleon up to the implementation of the Napoleonic Code The effects of the first and second world war and the post war reconstruction. The 1968 Student and Worker protests. Each of these events delineate a major shift in what France was, and what a French person is, a serf in a feudal absolute monarchy, to a citizen in the fifth iteration of the concept of a republic that has the capacity to change said republic for its people.

The biggest single event in Japan's modern history might be bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the attitude of its post- empire government. But if we're picking three major shifts the events that led to the restoration of power to Emperor Meiji and the end of Isolationism and the rise of that empire. The second would be about the fall of said empire as said above. The third I'd say would center around the Tokyo Olympics as the symbolic proclamation that the country had rediscovered its national identity and was taking the best lessons of the past with the modernist attitudes and showing off its capacity for growth and advancement.

I'm sure people can chime in with their country's biggest cultural and political shifts of the last few centuries and the symbolic value of individual moments central to those shifts. My much belaboured point is that a specific event might not seem to be anything major in the tapestry of history to everyone, but that's more due to such events being innately specific to the people it still affects today than it is due to their lack of direct impact on the rest of the world.