Here’s the secret of typesetting vertical Japanese text: You turn all the characters anticlockwise 90°. It is now exactly the same process as typesetting any L-

Here’s the secret of typesetting vertical Japanese text: You turn all the characters anticlockwise 90°. It is now exactly the same process as typesetting any L-R text. Regarding your epiphany, (a) Word doesn't turn on kerning by default, but it does indeed kern properly. I don't use Powerpoint, but I'm guessing there might be a similar setting on the second tab of the font modal for turning on kerning. I don't know where you get your claim that Adobe tools don't kern properly, but they very much do. And finally, kerning is just as important for sans-serif type as it is for serifed type. The only arena it doesn't come into play is monospace type. Which, perhaps surprisingly, Japanese type traditionally is.