This is because char is a primitive type which can be used as a numerical value. Every character in a string is encoded as a specific number (not entirely true in all cases, but good enough for a basic understanding of the matter) and Java allows you to use chars in such a way.
It probably allows this mostly for historical reasons, this is how it worked in C and they probably motivated it with "performance" or something like that.
If you think it's weird then don't worry, I think so too
The other answer is incorrect actually. ASCII is a specific encoding (an encoding is some specification that says "1 = A, 2 = B, ... , 255 = Space") and that is not the one used in Java. A Java char is two bytes wide and is interpreted through the unicode character encoding.
