This paper describes an on-line handwritten Japanese text recognition system that is liberated from constraints on line direction and character orientation. The recognition system first separates freely written text into text line elements, second estimates the line direction and character orientation using the time sequence information of pen-tip coordinates, third hypothetically segment it into characters using geometric features and apply character recognition. The final step is to select the most plausible interpretation by evaluating the likelihood composed of character segmentation, character recognition, character pattern structure and context. The method can cope with a mixture of vertical, horizontal and skewed text lines with arbitrary character orientations. It is expected useful for tablet PC's, interactive electronic whiteboards and so on.