You should be glad that it's not more, I'm pretty sure some Chinese dictionaries that are trying to list all of the characters as exhaustively as possible go into the dozens of thousands
With Japanese we have the official Joyo (常用) set, which is just for "normal use characters" and has significantly lowered the number from what it once was. There was a time when Japanese didn't even use Hiragana and Katakana, and only Kanji.
That's the most common, which is basically the minimum. But this is not including combinations, which add to the vocabulary and complexity to language.
Comparatively to English, you probably only use about 30,000 - 60,000 words regularly in your life. The Oxford English Dictionary contains at least 600,000.
lol...
