VOX POPULI: Vertical writing an indispensable part of thinking in Japanese Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a daily column that runs on Page 1 of The Asahi Shimbun.

Waygo, an app that lets you translate Chinese by hovering your phone over text, just added support for Japanese. Waygo recently won the SXSW 2014 Accelerator program and is also a 500 Startups alum.

Users of the updated app will also now be able to translate vertical text for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean—using their device’s camera. Advertisement - scroll for more content.

Yes, it’s true. Japanese has three completely separate sets of characters, called kanji, hiragana, and katakana, that are used in reading and writing. That first rendering of “Tokyo” is in kanji, with ...