How long is 18,000 Japanese characters?

Written continuously without line breaks, 18,000 Japanese characters fill exactly 45 sheets of 400-square manuscript paper (genko yoshi) — 900 lines in total — and roughly 12.5 A4 pages at a common 40 × 36 layout. Reading it aloud takes 1 hr; silent reading about 36 min.

Conversion table

All figures assume full-width characters written continuously with no line breaks or spaces. Real text uses paragraphs and line breaks, so actual sheet counts tend to be higher.

What this volume looks like

Equivalent to exactly 45 sheets of 400-square manuscript paper

Text with more kanji looks denser on the page, while hiragana-heavy text looks lighter. The same 18,000 characters can feel quite different, so check the kanji ratio too (the character counter measures it).

How these numbers are calculated

• Manuscript paper: 18,000 characters ÷ 400 = 45 sheets. Lines are counted at 20 characters per line, rounded up — the same basis as this site's character counter.
• A4: converted at a common word-processor layout of 40 characters × 36 lines (1,440 characters per page). Actual page counts vary with margins, font and line spacing.
• Reading aloud: calculated at 300 Japanese characters per minute (the same basis as the counter's speech-time display).
• Silent reading: calculated at 500 Japanese characters per minute (the same basis as the counter's reading-time display).

Where 18,000 characters shows up

• A full-scale volume, comparable to a thesis chapter, a booklet or a short story.

Character limits are counted differently by each service (full-width vs. half-width, emoji, URLs) and may change. For the latest limits, see the social media character limit guide.

Related tools

• Count your own text with the character counter
• See character limits by social media service
• Browse all character-count pages

Nearby character counts

• 16,000 characters
• 17,000 characters
• 19,000 characters
• 20,000 characters