Unicode not showing up until the 90's can't have helped.
There are established sorting orders in Japanese though - how could they have dictionaries otherwise?. There's gojūon which orders words based on the pronunciation of the word. It literally means 50 sounds but modern Japanese only uses 46 of them. It starts with the 5 vowel sounds a, i, u, e, o then has rows of corresponding sounds (where they exist) in a set order with ka, ki, ku, ke, ko coming next so for example you'd find ao (meaning blue, but also green, but let's not get into that...) shortly before aka (red) in a dictionary sorted this way.
Kanji can have different readings so they can be sorted into I think as many as 214 groups based on their radical - a common element a group contains, and then they're sorted by increasing number of strokes within their groups.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
