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In [The Global Soul: Pico
Iyer](http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/stories/s176913.htm), (disclaimer: the
depiction of Japan may be offensive) Iyer says:

> Rather perversely I live in Japan, which, as you know, is the most alien
> science fiction place on earth for those of us from other countries.
>
> When you get there they read from right to left and back to front.

So far, I've only experienced horizontal writing being from left to right.
I've heard that vertical writing is top to bottom, and the next column is on
your left, though I've never tried reading any vertical text with more than
one column.

[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing_in_East_Asian_scripts#Right-
to-left_horizontal_writing) states that when there's only one row of text,
writing in columns consisting of a single letter can result in text going from
right to left.

Are there any other cases where Japanese reads from right to left?
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orthography
Under what circumstances does Japanese read from right to left?
Yes - in the past it was quite usual to see labels written from right to left

eg （if remember correctly):

> ルービ・ロポッサ
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Your Wikipedia knowledge is correct - vertical Japanese is top-to-bottom,
right-to-left; and historically (i.e. pre-WWII), horizontal text was treated
as a single row of vertical text. This meant that since you start on the right
when reading vertically, you started on the right here as well. Most of the
time this was restricted to places where text didn't really fit well
vertically (e.g. over/under images). Since WWII this usage has been replaced
with writing horizontal text the same way Western languages write horizontal
text, i.e. left to right (because, unlike with scripts like Arabic, you don't
have to modify the actual letters in any way).

As a result, with extremely few examples, any example of right-to-left
horizontal text you'll see in modern Japan is either historical or
historically-flavoured (or period-correct, if it appears within fiction).
You'll see it if you look at images from prewar Japan, though (a good example
might be propaganda posters).

Japanese is not the only language that has done this, pretty much any writing
system derived from Chinese did the same thing (for example, a good deal of
Chinese temples have signs across the entrance written right-to-left).
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[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AlhoZ.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AlhoZ.jpg)

#  ⇳

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mhhte.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mhhte.jpg)

(The upper image from: <http://p.twipple.jp/zAedi>; the lower from:
<http://portal.nifty.com/cs/mitaiwa/detail/100607127809/1.htm>)
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