2018 Olympics Opening Ceremony

The host nation decided to sort the countries according to its native alphabet? Shocking!
It seems like nobody was left out, though.

I don't see how not using a Latin-script alphabet is a 'monstrosity'. They still have an alphabet, but just because it isn't familiar to you, that doesn't make it monstrous.

Confusing to whom, exactly? The people who learn all the countries in (Latin) alphabetical order?
I for one am happy that they used their own conventions. What point is there of holding the games in a different country every four years (or two years, actually), when everybody does the same things? Korea is making the event its own, if only in a small way.

And the comparison with China or Japan doesn't hold up. They don't use alphabets to write their native languages. Korean does.

Again, Korean uses an alphabet. It has a seperate letter for every sound (and is more consequent in that respect than most languages with Latin-based alphabets, particularly English). Chinese and Japanese don't. Their scripts are based on syllables and meaning. It might take more time to transcribe these two languages, but not Korean.
I'm still waiting for a good reason why they shouldn't use their own order, besides you not liking it.

Oh boy, you all have made a right mess of this whole alphabet thing. Let me clear all these things up as simply as I can.

First of all, it's Olympic tradition that Greece, as the originator of the Olympic Games, always enters the stadium first. The host nation, whomever it may be, always enters last. This created an interesting conundrum during Athens 2004; the Greek flag led the Parade of Nations, but the actual team did not enter until the very end.

Now as for this year, where most of the confusion appears to come up, let me explain a few things about the languages themselves:

(Source: am Korean-American, can read Korean and some Japanese)

While it's true Chinese "alphabetizes" based on character and stroke order, to say they have a definite "alphabet" as most of us know it would be wildly inaccurate. Chinese characters--hanzi--are mostly ideographic, conveying words and ideas through pictographs. They are not individual "letters" per se, but one character could be a component part of another. I'm not Chinese, so I can't speak to how they have their "alphabetical order," for lack of a better term, much further than this.

The Japanese "borrowed" these characters for their own use (kanji) but also have a sort of "alphabet" of their own. Hiragana and katakana are the native Japanese syllabaries, which have no pictorial meaning--they simply outline how to read a particular character. Why are there two of them? Hiragana is used primarily for native Japanese words, while katakana is used almost exclusively for foreign words. Japanese alphabetical order starts with vowel sounds: A (ah), I (ee), U (oo), E (eh), O (oh). The consonant sounds follow in groups; each consonant group then follows vowel order. So the K sounds are the next group of sounds, and go KA, KI, KU, KE, KO before moving on to the S group (SA, SHI, SU, SE, SO), then on to T (TA, CHI, TSU, TE, TO), and so on: N, H, M, Y (only YA, YU, and YO), R, and W (only WA and WO). The only ending consonant is -N, and this syllable does not appear at the beginning of any Japanese word.

As for why they used the English alphabet instead of the Japanese one for the Parade of Nations...nobody knows.

Then there's Korean, which used to use Chinese characters until King Sejong invented the Korean alphabet in the 16th century. Korean has consonants and vowels, but individually they do nothing--a Korean syllable is a combination of at least one consonant and at least one vowel. Like Japanese, consonant groups follow vowel order.

Consonant order: Hard G, N, D, R, M, B, S, (vowels), J, CH, K, T, P, H
Vowel order: AH, YAH, EO, YEO, OH, YOH, OO, YOO, EU, I (ee)

Put these together, and for the first group, you have GA, GYA, GEO, GYEO, GO, GYO, GU, GYU, GEU, GI. These sounds, in that order, precede any sound beginning with N in the Korean alphabet. These are the syllables upon which Korean words are built.

There are other vowel sounds formed by the combination of two or more vowels that I haven't gone into, but they have their own place in the vowel order as well. In addition, syllables can end in almost any consonant.

...whew.