Originally Posted by chrishirst

That's interesting, I have never seen any Japanese magazines so I didn't realise that. It could certainly make an interesting project for a japanese language CMS.

Is that the same for Kanji and Hiragana?

Yep.

Kanji, hiragana, katakana , even romanji (english letters) are printed as single character columns in some types of publications.

Its not on everything though. Adverts and labels tend to be LTR.

Just fyi

The two styles of Japanese writing are

Yokogaki style writes left-to-right, top-to-bottom, as with English

and

Tategaki style writes first top-to-bottom, and then moves right-to-left.

CSS level 3 includes a property "writing-mode" which can render tategaki when given the value "tb-rl" (i.e. top to bottom, right to left).

Useful article on Japanese Web Localization if anyone is interested.

Thank you very much for the information about Japanese websites