Japanese text has traditionally been written and printed vertically, beginning from the upper right corner as I've tried to make clear in this example image: http://tinypic.com/r/2z4l72r/6 . While much Japanese on the internet is printed horizontally, due to current limitations in html/css that require some hacks to get vertical text, nearly all printed Japanese media is still vertical, and it reads much more naturally this way. Further, css3, along with support for bidi text, is supposed to bring support for easily rendering vertical text:( http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-writing-modes/ is the current editor's draft) .

To describe my use case, I am currently working on an application for learning foreign languages through assisted reading of texts, targeted primarily at Japanese learners. Because I will need to support rather large amounts of text at a time, naive attempts to force JavaFX to render vertical text (which might be fine for small labels or other situations) are simply untenable here. In the best case scenario, JavaFX would have a couple of css properties to describe the flow of the text, and it would just work. I've looked into implementing this myself, but in the Text source code, the assumption that text will be horizontal seems to go all the way down, making this a bit difficult to implement as a custom control.