A Japanese physicist who I worked with as a post-doc spotted the Japanese edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in the wild, and picked up a copy. He sent along a scan of a couple of pages of the text, one of which I reproduce here:
I had totally forgotten that Japanese books are often printed with the text in vertical columns from right to left, which creates a slightly weird effect. What's even stranger, though, is the way the equations are done-- they're also rotated to be vertical, but the kanji characters are rotated as well. Not that the rotation changes the readability in any significant way, for me, but it's kind of weird.
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I would say "it's all Greek to me", except that I would recognize the Greek letters....
Personally I think the buttcrack in the second paragraph is more odd.
Funny to see kana(?) in kets. I just threw my first Greek letter at the kids yesterday.
They are Kanji, not Kana.
| Left > and | Right > frequently appear on the page.
http://www.neverland.to/kanji/current/hidari.html
http://www.neverland.to/kanji/current/migi.html
I guess it's more practical to write out the equations vertically than have a mix of vertical text and horizontal equations. I don't think that they do write out their equations that way on a blackboard. At least I've never seen the nippon do that on conferences.