Can sorting Japanese kanji words be done programmatically?

Question

I\'ve recently discovered, to my astonishment (having never really thought about it before), machine-sorting Japanese proper nouns is apparently not possible.

I work

Answer 1

Nice to hear people are working with Japanese.

I think you're spot on with your assessment of the problem difficulty. I just asked one of the Japanese guys in my lab, and the way to do it seems to be as you describe:

1. Take a list of Kanji
2. Infer (guess) the yomigana
3. Sort yomigana by gojuon.

The hard part is obviously step two. I have two guys in my lab: 高橋　and 高谷. Naturally, when sorting reports etc. by name they appear nowhere near each other.

EDIT

If you're fluent in Japanese, have a look here: http://mecab.sourceforge.net/

It's a pretty popular tool, so you should be able to find English documentation too (the man page for mecab has English info).