Major league baseball players arrived from Japan exactly ten years ago but already are more known than films or directors from their nation’s century-plus cinema history, now challenged by those of its Pacific Rim neighbors. What we do know of that illustrious history, and what we want to learn, is in A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, just out in a revised update of the 2001 original edition. Likened in his field of expertise to Boswell and Gibbon in theirs, author-filmmaker Donald Richie, once Curator of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, has lived in the Land of the Rising Sun for over fifty years and is the West’s interpreter of its culture, people, institutions, cuisine and worldview.

Handsomely slip-covered, on eye-friendly yellow-toned paper and singularly free of the typos and errors of many current books, this affordable twenty-two-dollar paperback from Kodansha International is supplemented with a bibliography, a selective listing with capsule reviews of available (and also pertinent but now unavailable) DVDs and videocassettes, and a short glossary of terms. Happily coinciding with a windfall of unconnected Japanese film series in New York City alone,  this is the definitive treatment of its subject and will remain so for years to come.

Subtitled “A Concise History,” the short two-hundred-fifty-eight pages of actual text are dense with information: historical periods, politics, various types of theater, architecture, woodblocks, social movements, censorship, ideologies, native and foreign literature, imported films and directors, finance, technology.

For readers lazy or foolish enough to skip an unobtrusive note that “personal names are romanized in their original order: family names first,” things may start out confusing until, say, Kurosawa Akira turns on a mental lightbulb. Which is not to say that all then turns smooth sailing, for in packaging so much into such short space, Richie must necessarily summarize and comment on film after film. Even compared to the appalling destruction and disappearance of negative stock elsewhere, Japan’s losses stand out -- ninety percent of its pre-1945 production has not survived -- and this vacuum further complicates comprehension, in that the films can be written about but never viewed.

Especially with unfamiliar names, the lists and summaries are not the stuff of casual reading even when serving to illustrate a particular point or trend. Ultimately, they will be best for the  connoisseur or, through the index, to reference a particular work.

For the moviegoer or fan, as distinct from serious cinema historians, however, there are the rewarding overviews where individual films take a backseat to clear and informative bird’s-eye considerations, five-to-ten-page coverage of pre- and post-World War Two censorship; anti-mainstream “New Wave” and the inroads of television; soft-core blue pornography, yakuza films and manga-anime; and directors like Ichikawa Kon and his screenwriter wife Wada Natto, Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujiro and Kurosawa, the latter two of whom have earlier been given book-length treatment by Richie.

In the above cases, conditions -- cultural, financial or technological -- give rise to climate which in turn creates a general need at a concrete moment. More nicely theoretical than definitive, such generalizations have their holes and inconsistencies, as for example when a filmmaker’s career spans several decades and thus evidences change, development, even apparent reversal.

For reasons among which geography figures large, Japan has lived, and in ways remains, isolated, sometimes isolationist. Therein lie the opposing pulls about which Richie convincingly, though not blindly or exclusively, structures his consideration. Famous for improving rather than inventing, since 1854 Japan's inhabitants have imported ideas and things, embraced them more or less wholeheartedly until reaction sets in, and then wound up assimilating them through transformation into something distinctly Japanese.

 "Japanification" is early embodied in "'Japanese Spirit and Western Culture' (Wakon Yosai) -- in that order. The national ineffables of Japan were to illuminate Western materialism.” Tradition, the past, the family and group, on the one hand; modernization, the contemporary, the individual, on the other, although in today’s global village “whether something is traditional or not is no longer a concern -- no one can tell and no one cares.”

Corollary to this, or perhaps vice versa, is Richie’s East-West comparison, implied as underlying basic aspects, not only of cinema, but of life itself: mono no aware, recognition of palpable beauty but insistence on ephemerality, and therefore Asia’s preference for the “presentational,” where style and method predominate, over European-American “representation” of supposedly unfiltered physical reality -- loosely, the extremes of manga vs. documentary -- with impressionism/expressionism and other –isms shared by both.

With its introduction to the richness of Japanese film as well as its wise exploration of a unique culture and a consideration of what any nation possesses that no other does and of what all possess and seek in common, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film emerges as an indispensable book for those who would understand eastwards and the insularity of all nations.