Even in Chinese, there exists several conventions for sorting characters (by stroke count or by radical/strokes or by pinyin...)
At least in Japanese, there is little agreement about the radicals, and different dictionaries often have different opinions about which radical is the right one, resulting in quite different sorting in different dictionaries.
For examples, older editions of the Japanese "Nelson" kanji dictionary state that the radical for "å" is the left part, while the newer edition thinks that the right part is the radical.
Stefan
