[dahfizz]

> Wouldn't the various Chinese languages, and Japanese scripts, have way more characters?

It depends on how you define "character", I guess. The hirigana or katakana "alphabets" have 48 characters. These alphabets map best to the western use of characters.

Kanji is probably what you are thinking of, where each word in Japanese gets its own "character". There are ~50,000 different kanji symbols.