In English, we measure the length of texts in words. 1,000 words for the average college essay, 50,000 for something like a fiction novel.

I’m wondering what unit is used to measure Japanese texts. I’ve seen conflicting answers online. Some measure the length in pages—but page count is not an accurate measure of a text, as fonts and spacing can vary.

I’ve also seen stuff about character and word counts, but I’m a little confused about the usage of the word “文字” as it pertains to this subject. 明日, for example, is two characters but one word. あした, on the other hand, is the same one word, only now it’s three characters.

So are texts measured in pages, characters, words, or something else entirely?