MIT has a ton of course material online for 1800 of their courses, and that includes Japanese ^_^
Here's a link to the study material for the Beginning Japanese 1 class:
MIT OpenCourseWare | Foreign Languages and Literatures | 21F.501 Beginning Japanese I, Fall 2004 | Study Materials
For some reason, the pictures/text for the Japanese doesn't work on my comp, but if you go to the page for the individual character and click on the picture icon, you get a movie of someone drawing it w/ the right stroke order.
Anyway, it's a place to start. By the way, the book I used was Japanese The Written Language (JWL) by Professor Eleanor Jorden and Mari Noda. I thought it was pretty good^_^ We had the "Field Test Edition" so it had a few mistakes, but the real edition is out now and I expect it's quite a good book.