Unlike english and european and many eastern languages which have a character set of 26 or 50, Japanese Language has more than 2000 characters , which can be divided in 3 subsystems, Katakana, Hirangana and Kanji. The latter is again is derivate of Chinese writing system. However Chinese does not have katakana and Hiragana. Chinese have more than 5000 kanjis or pictograms.

The present day kanji system in Japanese is derived from Chinese writing system a 1000 years ago , which came into Japan along with the spread of buddism in Japan. Currently, the Japanese government prescribes around 2000 Kanjis as official syllabus for schools, along with the Kana ( collective for Katakana and Hirangana).

Japanese is written in both ways according to conveinence of the space available, newspapers write titles from left to write , but the content from top to bottom. Books are generally written from top to bottom to be read from right to left. Some books are written to hold it on the left hand and read like a back to front of an english book. And magazines are like the rest of the world magazines, left to right.
About Pic. A news paper cutting. The writing is from top to bottom and read from right to left.

For more details about Grammar and the writing system, you may refer to guide to japanese .org

Well then, what am I writing about Japanese Language which is not already there?

When I started learning Japanese 5 years back, we did not have proper induction to Japanese for the IT engineers. We were taught basic daily level conversational grammar and were sent to Japan. What happened next! We failed about 15 consecutive interviews and were jobless. Finally Toshiba gave us a chance to work on a small internal web application, that too because we did not have to speak in the interview, the middle man or the consultant did all the speaking.

I think, people contemplating to come to Japan on a job, one must know, not just daily conversational Japanese but, they should master their japanese vocabulary related to their business domain. People dealing with exports should master Japanese export terminology and people belonging to IT should learn Japanese IT vocabulary.

I will try to put compile Japanese IT words as much as possible, so that it would be useful for people coming to Japan to work in the IT field.