How to use the Japanese Character Counter
- Type or paste your Japanese text into the box.
- Japanese characters counts kanji, hiragana and katakana. Characters counts everything, including 、。and spaces.
- See the split between kanji, hiragana and katakana under Writing systems.
- Tick Don't count punctuation as characters if your limit leaves punctuation out.
How Japanese text is measured
Japanese is measured in characters (文字数) rather than words, because words aren't separated by spaces. School essays, job applications and manuscripts usually give a character limit, and many are written on 400-character manuscript paper (原稿用紙), where punctuation also takes a square. Divide the character count by 400 for a rough page count.
Kanji, hiragana and katakana
The Writing systems table shows how many characters are kanji, hiragana and katakana. Kanji ratio is a common readability check: text for children and learners uses more kana, while news and technical writing has more kanji. The long vowel mark ー is counted with Japanese characters.
Words and the Word-style count
The Words count uses your browser's Japanese dictionary to find word boundaries, so treat it as an estimate. The Word-style count counts each Japanese character as one and adds the words in other languages, the same idea Microsoft Word uses.
X and SMS
X counts each Japanese character as 2, so a post holds about 140 Japanese characters; the limit bar counts the way X does. Text messages with Japanese fit 70 characters each.
Frequently asked questions
Does it count full-width spaces and punctuation?
Yes, in Characters. Japanese characters counts only kanji, hiragana, katakana and ー.
Are half-width katakana counted?
Yes, as katakana.
How many characters fit on one manuscript page?
Standard Japanese manuscript paper has 400 squares (20 × 20). Line breaks and indents leave squares empty, so real pages hold a little less.
Is my text uploaded?
No. Everything is counted in your browser.