My wife had paper tickets last week on a TG flight MNL-BKK-HAN and I upgraded it on the ANA website without a problem (except for one segment that never did have availablity). The tickets had not even been funded yet. When the upgrades finished her travel agent took the tickets over to TG and they put little green C stickers on them.

Also ANA has a good site to check for upgrade availability on *A flights. You have to be a member but that takes a few minutes to sign up. I use ANA because I can easily transfer AMX miles to them.