language-specific text alignment

["Susan F." <soofalk@gmail.com>]

This is a request for information on how to configure or customize
DocBook to perform language-specific processing. This is not a
question about language-specific text generation, or writing modes.
Desired processing logic is: if lang=jp then alignment=justify,
otherwise alignment=left.

We use XXE as our input tool, DocBook as formatting instructions, and
Apache ANT as our XML -> PDF processor. Our PDFs must be formatted
based on the requirements of their destination country (US, Korea,
China, Japan).

This announcement, http://markmail.org/message/5wo3fy4fk5zwrkdx, says
DocBook 1.74.2 has "support for writing.mode to set text direction and
alignment based on document locale". This seems like what we need. But
further investigation reveals that (a.) I don't know how to identify
the version of DocBook stylesheets I'm using (which I inherited), and
(b.) this support seems to be related only to HTML PI ??

Any suggestions, comments, ideas, solutions will be appreciated.
Thank you,
Susan