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context: movies > sources
A Hundred Years of Japanese Film by Donald Richie
This seems to be the definitive source for a general overview of Japanese cinema history, and it deserves its place, both for its peerless depth of knowledge and for the breadth of its analysis. It talks of commercial factors, Western influences, directors, producers, Japanese artistic traditions, Modernism and everything else you would want from such a book, always with insight and an eye for the telling detail or anecdote. It's about as perfect a broad survey of any subject as I have ever read - up to a point: as with many older writers, he has no feeling for a lot of modern film styles, and has a high-art sneer in his voice when he talks of manga and anime and their influences on movies. Some of this is entirely justified, of course, but he is far too sweeping, and you can feel him longing for the days of Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, and his distaste for the likes of Miike and Ishii is obvious. This is a real fault, and you have to treat his tone in the later sections with some scepticism. Since anime accounts for around half of movie revenue in Japan, it probably warrants more than 3% of this book, and Miyazaki for instance surely deserves better than one cursory paragraph.