I've been living in Japan for about 25 years and a lot of Westerners get confused over this. Concepts like "blue" and "green" are abstract. The word 青 covers a

I've been living in Japan for about 25 years and a lot of Westerners get confused over this. Concepts like "blue" and "green" are abstract. The word 青 covers a different part of the spectrum than the word "blue". People get hung up on "what's the Japanese word that means X", but often there is no word that means X. There is no distinct concept for X in Japanese. And this goes far beyond color names. European languages largely share a common cultural heritage and concepts tend to map between them relatively easily, but many cultures aren't like that. The Japanese stoplight colors are just the tip of a very, very deep iceberg.