This might not be FULLY true, but i believe that in Hiragana (ひらがな) there are 46, i am not quite sure about Katakana (カタカナ) or Kanji.
Many Asian cultures were influenced by China. Japan is no exception. Before Japan's introduction to Chinese, they had no writing system. So Japan eventually adapted, as well as changed, the Chinese language, which explains why many Chinese characters are still used in the Japanese language. Also, a section of the modern Japanese language called 'kanji' consists of Chinese characters. == ==
Yes they do.
Japanese language uses 2 alphabets (hiragana and katakana) in addition to more complex characters that are derived from the Chinese written language. Kanji (Japanese characters) are the same as Chinese characters.
there are 5 thousand Japanese characters
There is only one of Japanese language. You might got confused about the kanji and kana characters.
The japanese first borrowed from the Chinese. Then they simplified the chinese characters into the 50 'kanas'
The Japanese word for 'Scotland' is the same as in English, but approximated into the language with native phonemes. Written in Japanese it is: スコットランド. In English characters, it is "sukuttorando."
Japanese
Japanese and Chinese written language share some characters known as Han Zi. Japanese also uses Kanji that is not used in Chinese. Modern Chinese is read from left to right and top to bottom (like English). Japanese is not.
The Chinese Empire covered part of Japan long ago. The Japanese had to pay tribute to the Chinese Emperors for many centuries. Naturally they affected the Japanese culture. The Japanese Language even has Chinese Characters (known as Kanji) in it.
Japanese Characters, The English Language, (grammar, mathematics, etc)
It is said that some 50,000 kanji (Chinese characters) exist. However, many kanji are not necessarily used in daily life. The Japanese Ministry of Education designated 2,136 characters as Jooyoo Kanji, which are the most frequently used characters. It would be very helpful to learn all Jooyoo Kanji, but the basic 1,000 characters are sufficient to read about 90% of the kanji used in a newspaper (about 60% with 500 characters).