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Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

192 points by kitebive 3y ago

mdtrooper 3y ago
In Salamanca (Spain) there are some old traffic lights that they have blue (not a full blue more or less a half step between green and blue) color too. I think that they turned to blue for things of years and years of sun rays and raining and other climate things.
kirea 3y ago
Although the color of traffic lights is determined to be green, there is a reason why they are called green lights in Japan. The green color used in traffic lights in Japan is the closest to blue (blue-green) within the range of CIE regulations in consideration of people with color blindness, and historically, the green color used in Japanese traffic lights is One reason is that the range of "blue" is wide.
acadapter 3y ago
Color blindness compatible design is, IMO, a very neglected part of the equality debate, in many other fields. This disability has a very skewed gender ratio due to how it works genetically.
- mathieuh 3y ago
  Traffic lights are still fine for colour-blind people aren't they? The order of the lights doesn't change.
  - lll-o-lll 3y ago
    Night time?
    - Xerox9213 3y ago
      Also lights with more than three bulbs, some indicating left or right turns, of which will take on two or more colours themselves. Some lights have a bulb above red for cyclists and transit. Some lights called beacons are a single bulb that take on several colours. https://www.ontario.ca/document/official-mto-drivers-handbook/traffic-lights https://www.ontario.ca/document/official-mto-drivers-handboo...
  - smolder 3y ago
    Yes. They can still drive fine, but don't get the benefits of color coding, like being able to infer whether red or green is lit from the light reflected off of other objects. That becomes somewhat important in low visibility situations where the position is hard to determine.
    - teruakohatu 3y ago
      It seems the harder difficulty is red and yellow, see the comments in this article, but led lights have improved the situation for some: https://www.color-blindness.com/2007/02/06/colorblind-at-the-traffic-light/ https://www.color-blindness.com/2007/02/06/colorblind-at-the...
      - NegativeK 3y ago
        There are a few different types of colorblindness, so I wouldn't extrapolate that. For me personally, the green light looks much closer to a white than to, say, the green of a grass.
      - smolder 3y ago
        I just happen to have a friend with red-green blindness, who was my reference point in answering. It's good to point out there are different types with different impacts, though.
  - Toutouxc 3y ago
    Funny thing, I'm NOT colorblind and apparently I only rely on the color. I've been driving for over 10 years now, mostly in the capital that has traffic lights everywhere, and sitting at my desk now not looking at a traffic light, I wouldn't want to bet money on the order.
    - city41 3y ago
      I always assumed red was at the top as it's the most important. It's the first one to peak out behind tall trucks.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Some places have the lights sideways, and usually red is on the left, but it's not always consistent. If I were designing them I'd always have the red be noticeably larger.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 3y ago
    It depends on their kind of colorblindness. I see green lights as white, which is fine most of the time because of the order. The exception is when there's a lot of glare from the sun setting behind me, and I sometimes can't tell if it's green, or just the sun reflecting at the right angle. It also washes out the red and yellow, making it harder to see if they're lit.
    - Finnucane 3y ago
      I am the same--green traffic lights are nearly white. Normally, it's enough to know it's not the red or yellow light. Sometimes at night--face with an array of white lights in the distance--it can be an issue. At my last eye test at the RMV, the clerk tried to tell me I wasn't color blind. I mean, sure, I've been able to drive with it for 40 years, but I know damn well I'm color blind.
  - nemetroid 3y ago
    Horizontal lights are not consistent across countries. The linked article has an image of a Japanese horizontal traffic light with red on the right, whereas an American traffic light would have red on the left.
    - lozenge 3y ago
      And some countries don't have horizontal lights at all. https://youtu.be/sXbHdKJ1D78 https://youtu.be/sXbHdKJ1D78
      - LeonidasXIV 3y ago
        I don't think I've ever seen horizontal lights in Europe at all. Fairly common in Japan though.
      - bluGill 3y ago
        Which is even worse. I grew up in an area with only vertical lights. After several years of driving I ended up in an area with a horizontal light, one end was white and I had no clue if that meant stop or go. (I'm colorblind so I normally think top=stop, bottom=go)
  - watwut 3y ago
    Most color blind have issue to see shades and subtle differences. They see red and green just fine. The people who do not see red at all however, see red as black. So, they do not see red traffic light at all.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    > The order of the lights doesn't change. For 3 lights streetlights no. For 2 lights streetlights it depends. They can be (in DE) either red and yellow or yellow or green.
    - iggldiggl 3y ago
      AFAIK yellow + green is only ever used for turning traffic and is always installed together with a regular 3-bulb traffic light for the other directions. Stand-alone two-bulb traffic lights are always red + yellow, with red on top, just as usual.
  - perilunar 3y ago
    With the switch from incandescent bulbs to LED traffic lights it would be very easy to change the shape of the lights: e.g. octagonal for stop, triangular for caution, and circular for go. Keep the colors, but add shape as well. Seems like an obvious and useful change to me.
    - NegativeK 3y ago
      That might fall apart for people with poor visual acuity.
      - blincoln 3y ago
        If they're roughly the same size and in the same order as the round lights today, people with poor visual acuity would still see more or less what they see currently.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        If you can tell neither the color of the light, nor its shape... Should you be driving?
  - cafard 3y ago
    Almost fifty years ago, I worked with a guy who was color-blind. This was in Colorado, where at the time some of the little towns in the mountains still had traffic lights arranged horizontally rather than vertically. He must have known the order at one time--I think I learned it for my license test--but of course with little chance for reinforcement tended to forget. I suppose that such lights are all gone now.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      They're common in at least four states still: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXbHdKJ1D78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXbHdKJ1D78
  - izolate 3y ago
    > The order of the lights doesn't change. That argument has two issues: First, not all US traffic lights have order, as single-light ones replace stop signs in some (mostly suburban/rural) areas. Second, light position is still hard to discern at night. My personal take: the red and yellow hues in traffic lights are often indistinguishable for those of us with red-green colorblindness.
- Prcmaker 3y ago
  I learned this lesson in my first ever public lecture. Approximately 10% of my audience had some form of colour blindness, rendering the majority of my figures incapable of communicating their intent. Since then I have rendered all figures for public consumption in black and white, and lines instead of surfaces where possible.
  - quietbritishjim 3y ago
    Depending on what exactly your figures were/are, you might benefit from the viridis colour map, available in matplotlib and R (and probably in many other places). It's colourful, so those without colour blindness get a richer display than if you used greyscale, and the colours chosen aren't too affected by most common forms of colour blindness. But for those that really can't see the colours, even if you literally just convert to monochrome, it still works. It also looks nice :-) Here's a talk by the creators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU Here's a little article about it (with some R specifics): https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/intro-to-viridis.html https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/in...
    - f33d5173 3y ago
      Am I wrong that in that article magma appears to do better? Particularly in the last two (red-blind and grayscale), it seems like viridis looks the same for large parts of the scale, while magma retains its distinction.
      - quietbritishjim 3y ago
        I think it just won the poll [1] because it subjectively looks nicer. NJS, in that video, said something like: I don't care which wins, they're all so much better than the current situation. But magma is a good choice too and it's also available in matplotlib. [1] http://bids.github.io/colormap/ http://bids.github.io/colormap/
  - reportgunner 3y ago
    Android has a colorblind developer option in the settings you can use to quickly check how it might look for others. I just turn that on, open the camera and look at my color pallete through the camera.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Most green lights in the US have a blue tint so that color blind people can see the blue. Most but not all, which is really frustrating as a colorblind person. More than once I've been sitting at a light until my wife told me it was green as there is one light near me without that blue tint. (we are making a left turn so light has both the round red stop light and the green left turn arrow on at the same time)
  - saiya-jin 3y ago
    There is no clicking/hum that distinguishes those 2 states? If that's the case, you should probably check with council to have those nearby lights changed into disability-friendly setup. You may be surprised how effective it may be, maybe council has some part of the budget allocated to this so they will give it higher priority (or not, but at least try, you can help other people too)
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      Crosswalk lights in the US may have audio but usually not the roadway lights, and depending on the jurisdiction the crosswalk may not always get the light at the same time as the roadway, not to mention that you may not hear it if you are at the centermost lane of a road four or five lanes wide in each direction.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      There is for pedestrians, but when I'm in my car with the windows closed I can't hear them.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure the international agreement on road signaling completely forbids any stop and go light from being on the same place, so that you can distinguish them without depending on any color. But well, the US never follows any agreement it signs, so yeah, that happens.
    - bluGill 3y ago
twic 3y ago
The Reader's Digest article is just a mediocre summary of the Atlas Obscura one it links to: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-green-traffic-lights-blue https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-green-traffic-li... Although the latter does contain a complete misrepresentation of what "grue" means. The explanation is still unsatisfying. Japan had green lights, referred to in law by a word which means blue but has traditionally encompassed green as well. Pedants pointed out that it would be better if the law explicitly said green. Rather than changing the law or letting things be, the government ordered lights be changed to blue-green. This is, on the face of it, completely insane behaviour, but neither article attempts to explain why the government did this.
- sylware 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Huh, AO reads fine in w3m. Like many apparent JS-only websites (e.g. Medium), they seem to serve JS-free content if you pass a user agent that doesn't suggest JS-compatibility. https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/w3m-ao.png https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/w3m-ao.png
  - pzmarzly 3y ago
    AO may not work for you, but OP's link to rd.com doesn't work for me - I'm getting some difficult captchas from cloudflare that don't let me visit that site.
    - lopis 3y ago
      For those that are as confused as me, in the comment above "ao" refers to "Atlas Obscura" not to blue in Japanese.
    - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      Are you on a VPN or Tor by chance?
second_brekkie 3y ago
Maybe Korea also had blue traffic lights in the past. But they still call green traffic lights 'blue' even though all of them use a green coloured light. I think the use of blue to mean both blue and green has also been present in Korea for a long time. I wonder where it came from? In my limited experience if Korea and Japan share something culturally it often has its common derivation in Chineese tradition.
- iopq 3y ago
  Both come from the Chinese term 青 which in modern Chinese would by itself refer to colors anywhere between sky blue and grassy green 青天 - clear skies 青草 - green grass 清葡萄 - 청포도 - white grape
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    As vague as 青 might be, I'd have to allow that it's a more accurate description of the color of a grape than "white" is.
tnbp 3y ago
I used to wonder, as a kid, why most traffic lights in my region of Germany were red, orange-yellow and obviously turquoise. I remember drawing traffic lights (I loved drawing road layouts when I was young) without any use for the green pen. Nowadays, they all seem to be very much green, at least the new LED ones.
- TylerE 3y ago
  I’d say here in the US the LEDs skew much more blue than the incandeswnts they replace. Almost a teal.
schappim 3y ago
TL;DR: The traditional Japanese language did not have separate words for green and blue; instead, it used a single term "青" (ao) to cover both colours. Over time, the language evolved, but the initial categorisation of green as a type of blue stuck around in certain contexts, like traffic signals. This linguistic trait led to the designation of traffic signals that are green in colour as "青信号" (ao shingou), which literally translates to "blue signal."
dotancohen 3y ago
I believe that Greek, too, lacks a word for blue. Modern Greek speakers just use the English word blue as "mple" where "mp" stands in for the B sound which has no distinct letter in modern Greek.
- Tistron 3y ago
  Surprised me, and I wondered what sound Beta signifies in modern Greek. Apparently /v/.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    In Modern Greek, the voiced plosives of Ancient Greek, i.e. beta, delta and gamma, have become voiced fricatives, while the aspirated plosives of Ancient Greek have become voiceless fricatives. To deal with the voiced plosives that are present in many modern loanwords, from languages like English, they had to develop ways to write them, using the existing letters of their alphabet, and the solution was to use digraphs, like "mp" for English "b".
    - dotancohen 3y ago
      Thank you. How do modern Greek speakers pronounce the ancient words? With the new sounds, or the old sounds? Are there many ancient words in modern Greek?
      - adrian_b 3y ago
        I do not know if this remains true nowadays, but in the past most Modern Greek speakers pronounced the ancient words with the modern pronunciation, because this is how it was taught in schools, despite the fact that the Ancient Greek pronunciation was very different. This is the same like with the Latin language used by the Catholic Church, which traditionally had a modern pronunciation very unlike Ancient Latin, or how the Latin was traditionally taught in English schools, also with a modern pronunciation unlike the ancient pronunciation. In the last half of century, in many places the teaching of ancient languages has switched to using pronunciations as close as possible to what is known about the ancient pronunciations, but I do not know if this has also happened in Greece. The Modern Greek has replaced many ancient words with more recent loanwords, but as a reaction to this they have created a form of the language, Katharevousa, which was purged from many loanwords and which used a high proportion of Ancient Greek words. Katharevousa was used for many literary works in the past and it was the official language of Greece since independence until 1976. I do not know if there is still much use of Katharevousa for anything, except for reading the older books and other publications that have used it.
mgaunard 3y ago
They speak of this as if it was a Japan-only thing. The blue-green distinction is a late feature of most languages. Even Greek and Latin did not have as clear a distinction as we have today.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
  > They speak of this as if it was a Japan-only thing. Which other countries have blue traffic lights?
  - iopq 3y ago
    In China, for example, the word for green 綠 is used for the light 綠 is used in Japanese for the color of green tea, but they use 青 for the green light There's also 翠 in Japanese to mean a bright green, which in Chinese also has a blue connotation (based on the color of the kingfisher who dives 淬 to catch fish)
    - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
      I'm not doubting that multiple languages have that aspect to it, but as far as I know that does not result in blue traffic lights. I have not heard of an instance of a blue traffic light in China to go with your Chinese example.
      - iopq 3y ago
        Because they use 绿, not 青 so it would not result in blue lights But in Korea they have the same confusion: https://www.dreamstime.com/traffic-lights-road-blue-speed-limit-signs-south-korea-image235489567 https://www.dreamstime.com/traffic-lights-road-blue-speed-li...
        the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
        To the best of my knowledge it's different in Korea. As far as I know the call it blue lights but they are green.
wrp 3y ago
As mentioned, aoi ringo (blue apple) is a common term. When I moved to Japan many years ago, on my first visit to a McDonald's, I was initially excited then let down by the prospect of getting a "blue apple" milkshake.
sleepy_keita 3y ago
This reminds me of when I took my drivers' license test in Japan -- they'll do an eye exam including whether you can recognize the colors. The first color was this weird mix between blue and green, and when the administrator asked me what color was showing, it took me a moment to try to find a word to describe the color... then I realized, I'm at the DMV, they want "ao", so that's what I said.
- skhr0680 3y ago
  I passed that with flying colors by saying グリーン
tdiggity 3y ago
as other comments have pointed out, this also happens with other east asian languages. vietnamese is another one.
yznlp 3y ago
Not a linguist. I feel like this is just an issue of imperfect correspondence between the word "blue" in English and "ao" in Japanese. The article explains the historical reason why ao encompasses both blue and green, so I think the concept of semantic field comes into play here. As an analogy, a MacBook is a type of laptop, and laptops, desktops and tablets are all IT devices (for lack of a better word). Apple might have you believe that a MacBook is very different from a laptop and belongs in its own category, but to me I would still lump it under laptops. If I was presented with a MacBook, a desktop and a tablet and was asked to pick out the laptop, then it would be clear to me that the MacBook is the correct choice. Now, midori (green) is a type of ao ("grue"), and ao, kiiro (yellow) and aka (red) are all colours. English speakers argue that green is very different from blue and that they're different colours, but to Japanese speakers ao encompasses midori. If a Japanese speaker was presented with the colours green, yellow and red and was asked to pick out ao (in the context of traffic lights), then it would be clear that green is the correct choice. There are loads of situations where words in two languages seem to directly correspond to each other, but still they are subtly different especially when the nuances of the words are considered.
- troad 3y ago
  I trained as a linguist and you hit the nail on the head. Word meanings are fuzzy clouds of references and nuances, and every language has slightly different clouds. There is nothing magical about this, despite the recurrent lizard-brain notion that words or names are somehow mystical and intrinsic, and that these differences must somehow be meaningful. Differences are quite common with colour terms - you don’t need to go to Japanese (blue-green) or Ancient Greek (wine dark sea) for this. My own (European) first language draws a slightly different word cloud around the colours pink and purple than English does, for example. One word is only for hot pink, and the other is for purple and non-hot pinks. I assure you I see these colours the same as you do. If I were to use the English word “purple” to refer to more of a pink hue, it would be a mere language interference error, not some mystical Saphir-Whorf insight into the culturally-conditioned operation of my retinas. Words are not perception. This is such a pernicious bit of nonsense, and journalists and writers are especially susceptible to it because it flatters them, in their role as word-smiths. Languages are way more interesting than this pseudo-intellectual mysticism. The Japanese are just as capable of distinguishing blue and green as anyone else, and they use blue traffic lights for the same reason they drive on the left - because it doesn’t actually matter what convention they pick, so long as everyone agrees on it and sticks to it.
psychoslave 3y ago
Common, not a single mention of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://www.verywellmind.com/the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-7565585 https://www.verywellmind.com/the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-7565...
- troad 3y ago
  No, because it is discredited pseudo-science.
  - psychoslave 3y ago
    Even taking this as premise, it doesn’t mean it should not be mentioned. Knowledge that some hypothesis where disproved is also crucially important to understating and formation of sounder models. Regarding the adequacy of the assertion itself, every reader should judge by themselves to which level it extends.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Shame the Readers Digest has gone for such a modern bland looking site, and dropped their classic logo.
chx 3y ago
There's an amazing book on the naming of colors and more: Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> Hundreds of years ago, the Japanese language included words for only four basic colors: black, white, red, and blue. If you wanted to describe something green, you’d use the word for blue—“ao”—and that system worked well enough until roughly the end of the first millennium, when the word “midori” (originally meaning “sprout”) began showing up in writing to describe what we know as green. There's something going on here that the article doesn't explain. The new word is written 緑, which is also [the Japanese simplified spelling of] the Chinese word that means green in specific. But the Chinese word has always referred to a color, and it's never meant "sprout" -- the shuowen jiezi, written 800 years before the period the article indicates, defines it "帛靑黃色也"! So by the time this word is being written down, there is no sense of the concept "sprout" at all. The article seems to present this as a case of conceptual innovation internal to Japanese, which would have been much cooler than the apparent reality of the Japanese starting to use an already well-established concept more often. Now I want to know why, if midori originally meant "sprout", it does not seem to have the spelling 芽 ("sprout" - 萌芽也) as a possibility...?
- themaninthedark 3y ago
  That explanation seems wrong to me, when you refer to sprout like things i.e. spring leaves on trees you use 青葉 - blue leaves. https://kotobank-jp.translate.goog/word/%E9%9D%92%E8%91%89-24156?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://kotobank-jp.translate.goog/word/%E9%9D%92%E8%91%89-2...
- erutuon 3y ago
  As far as I can tell from Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B7%91#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B7%91#Japanese), though I don't speak Japanese, the Japanese word midori has had the meaning "bud" or "sprout", but the Chinese words written with the same character don't. Spelling and word identity are distinct. This confuses me sometimes when looking up Japanese words.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > Spelling and word identity are distinct. What I'm saying is: 1. If "midori" began with the meaning "sprout", then... 2. its spelling in early texts should have been 芽 [sprout] and not 綠 [green]. The spellings were fixed a long time before the article identifies the change as taking place. The Japanese spelling of a word must develop by either (1) the Japanese borrowing a Chinese word with the meaning of the Japanese word; (2) option #1, but the Japanese meaning of the word later shifts; (3) option #1, but the Japanese spelling of the word later shifts [this would be weird]; (4) indigenous innovation of a character; or (5) refusal to use a character at all. "Midori" appears to have begun its life by being spelled as if it meant "green" and to have continued to mean "green" since that time. This is strange if it originally meant "sprout", and I'd like to know more about the claim and the history.
woolion 3y ago
If you read any Chinese/Japanese literature, for example Buddhist or zen texts, it is very common to encounter very weird uses of the words blue or green-- because they mean things that somebody used to these distinct categories will classify nature according to these boxes. Trees are green, bodies of water blue -- even if that is more complex than that, some pines can be very blue, rivers or lakes can be much greener than blue, etc. Some translators avoid this issue by always using the term "blue/green", which is really awkward, and I couldn't find any explanation for it before learning about "the crayola-ification of the world" [0]. Before I thought that was a poetic literary device. It is really hard not to think of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis when learning about this. At the same time, taoist philosophy tends to point out that misery comes from our mind's discriminating eye; everything is categorized in boxes, good and bad, concept and not-concept. Maybe having more categories is better from a technical standpoint, but more difficult to handle from a spiritual standpoint? At the same time, this spiritual view tend to see man as needing to overcome his beastly nature, and thus this added technical discrimination is not burden since it is simply part of the path towards a higher level of consciousness? [0] https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our-brains-part-i/ https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of...
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > because they mean things that somebody used to these distinct categories will classify nature according to these boxes. Very interesting. Could you explain this part in a little more detail?
  - woolion 3y ago
    I'm not sure I'll answer properly but I'm thinking of how information retrieval works in the brain and how similar it is to word vectors and heatmaps. There is a well known trick (I don't know if there's actual research behind) that when asked for a tool and a color, people will answer red hammer. There are many tools and colors but these come to mind quickly because they are so frequent, simple, etc. Therefore the concept used for information retrieval implicitly creates a set of all possible words that satisfy it. For instance "bird" will make the person think of pigeons, sparrows, crows, so it naturally implies "flight". It's only by precising either "flightless" or a specific flightless bird that the association is removed. The implication goes both ways: flightless birds tend to not come to mind, despite chickens being extremely common. Furthermore, it is quite counterintuitive to just take arbitrary conjunction of categories (e.g. a bird or a chair). By comparison, discriminating further is very easy, and people tend to be able to much easier think of different elements of the same subcategory (e.g. different breeds of pigeons). Koans tend to revolve around erroneous thought or language patterns, and so having the "blue or green" category was an obvious example of falling into either of my known boxes (blue or green) before being reminded that the concept encompassed both.
cxrlosfx 3y ago
Red cabbage or Blue Cabagge, in northern Germany is also called red cabbage (Rotkohl), same color for some regions of Austria and Switzerland (Rotkraut). In southern Germany it is called Blue Cabagge (Blaukraut). If you ask people in Germany what the color of the vegetable is, they will answer "purple" (lila). There are some strange ways in the evolution of a language, depending on the region and events in the region. It's normal, whatever normal means in this case, to think that a color is the same as a similar hue, in my example above, between red and blue you can find purple, violet "lilac" hues. As a personal anecdote, the name for (orange) carrot in Southern Bavarian dialect is Gelberübe, Rübe for root vegetable and Gelb for yellow, also yellow is connected with orange in the brain and the language of the people. A purple carrot has the honor to be called "lilane GelbeRübe", or purple yellow vegetable root in English.
- Findecanor 3y ago
  Red cabbage is a bit of a weird example because its colour depends first on the acidity/basicity of the soil it was grown in, and then when you're using it on the acidity of other ingredients. For example, if you cook it with apple (which is acidic), it will turn redder.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I don't think this distinction stems from the same source. Blue/green distinction is a clear step in linguistic development that happened in different stages for different civilisations, but they're more of a result of linguistic developments, local available colours, and manufacturing capability than a reference to plants. This particular cabbage is coloured by a chemical that responds to the pH of the stuff it comes into contact with. The colour can range from quite bright red to quite clear blue, and even green or yellow. It's perfectly possible for the red cabbages to be turned into blue dishes, and the pH of the soil will also have a large effect on the colour produced by the plant. You can see on various stock photos how the plant has a clear blue hue (before harvesting, at least): https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/rotkraut.html?pseudoid=5625F67BAF314E99BCE3348FB2294984&sortBy=relevant https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/rotkraut.html?pseudoid=562... Even ignoring the leaves, the outside of the parts that generally get cooked have a clear blue hue in many pictures I can see. The reason "lila" wasn't used to describe the cabbage is that the German language lacked a word for it. It entered the German vocabulary somewhere in the 19th century (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lila#German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lila#German). In a similar fashion, there was no separate word for orange in many European languages until somewhere around the 15th-16th century, when oranges (the fruit) were starting to get imported. You had yellow-red and other hue combinations, but it wasn't as separate as it is today. I'm sure there were people who used "Rotblaukohl", but it makes sense that only one colour remained. As for the carrot, orange carrots were actually not all the common for centuries. The original plants now known as carrots were imported to Europe from the middle east and cultivated in the Netherlands, but orange carrots weren't all that common in Europe before the 16th/17th century. The base plant of the orange carrot was actually white/yellow and got its orange outside hue quite some time later, after selective breeding. I wouldn't be surprised if the carrots that were first exported to modern German areas were still yellow in colour. Gelbrübe for orange carrots makes a lot of sense, historically. I do like the "purple yellow root" name, especially since the first carrot cultivars to reach Europe (long before orange/yellow carrots) were actually purple. I don't think they received quite the popularity carrots received, at least not much further north than the Mediterranean.
workfromspace 3y ago
https://archive.ph/uj03N https://archive.ph/uj03N (rd.com requires JS)
cthalupa 3y ago
Other people have covered the linguistic aspect enough so no need for me to rehash it, but, the picture in that article is far more blue than any traffic light I've seen in Tokyo in my months there. If I had to describe them with a single word, I'd choose green without hesitation - they just have a bit of a blue tinge to them. Some example photos from google image that look closest to what I've seen: https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/129881591-traffic-lights-changing-signal-shibuya-crossing-tokyo-japan https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/129881591-traffic-l... https://depositphotos.com/editorial/traffic-lights-ginza-district-tokyo-japan-325410734.html https://depositphotos.com/editorial/traffic-lights-ginza-dis... I've not really left Kantō so maybe they are more likely to be more prominently blue elsewhere? Kansai and Hokkaidō google image searches show (mostly) green traffic lights too.
- city41 3y ago
  The article seems to imply outside of Tokyo with "Elsewhere around the island" and perhaps "Drive around Japan long enough". It would be nice if the article was more specific here, but it's also just a Reader's Digest summary.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I've seen almost-blue stop lights (go lights?) in the USA, and before everything was LED the color variation between various lights was pretty wide. You could almost always figure it out in context, but absolutely speaking some red lights were almost as yellow as some other light's yellow.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kouru225 3y ago
  I’ve seen very blue traffic lights in Japan both in Kyoto and Tokyo. I think the weirdest part of this story that isn’t talked about in the article is that Japan doesn’t seem to have any regulation or consistency defining which shade of blue/green the traffic light should be. Different areas will have different colors and even the same area will have different colors.
2143 3y ago
Just a data point that I want to put out there. I have long heard that Japan has blue traffic lights. Earlier this year I visited Japan. Because I had heard about the blue traffic light situation, I paid special attention to the traffic lights. They all appeared green to me. In both Tokyo and Osaka. Okay maybe a tinge of blue if you look at it and wonder 'is this blue?', but the only reason I wondered was because I had heard the blue traffic light trivia. If I had never heard about it I wouldn't have given it a second thought. However, the picture in the linked article seems to have an unmistakable blue color; I don't understand what's going on. Beautiful country by the way; would love to visit again :)
- vages 3y ago
  I am looking out my hotel room window in Hiroshima in this very instant, and I even got my wife to confirm it: The traffic lights definitely are GREEN.
  - doubled112 3y ago
    I'm glad you mentioned that you had your wife confirm, because I'm convinced my wife sees more colours than I do, and I can't be the only one. I've had this exact discussion. What colour is this? Blue. No, can't you see it's green? Maybe it has some green in it Okay, so is it blue or green? Yes! Why did you ask me then?
    - Izkata 3y ago
      Maybe not more colors, but more easily distinguishes them: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brain-babble/201504/when-it-comes-to-color-men-women-arent-seeing-eye-to-eye https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brain-babble/20150... This is different from tetrachromacy, where some women really do see more colors: https://www.optimax.co.uk/blog/tetrachromacy-superhuman-vision/ https://www.optimax.co.uk/blog/tetrachromacy-superhuman-visi...
      - galangalalgol 3y ago
joeconway 3y ago
As a British person living in the USA I often enjoy that the line between blue and green shades definitely differs between cultures and there are certain shades of teal that US/UK folks will strongly disagree on. I’ve since noticed that I think this question of where “that is definitely green” ends and “that is obviously blue” begins is different for lots of countries
- dghughes 3y ago
  I also find it fascinating that cultures have so many words for colours or so few words for colours either way it's interesting. Here is a good video on colour and how many cultures perceive colour and name them, or not. "The surprising pattern behind color names around the world" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg&t=35s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg&t=35s
upofadown 3y ago
If you go out and buy LEDs for use in a traffic signal in North America, you will have to specify the colour as "cyan". That is because the monochromatic wavelength sits in the place between green and blue. So the same sort of situation in naming occurs in that part of the world too. You can call the colour green, but you could just as legitimately call the colour blue. It really just ends up being a convention.
creade 3y ago
I don't know if its a urban legend or not, but I always heard that this was the upstream cause this plugin [1] in jenkins being a day one install on teams I was on [1] https://plugins.jenkins.io/greenballs/ https://plugins.jenkins.io/greenballs/
- dogleash 3y ago
  Yep. https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2012/03/13/why-does-jenkins-have-blue-balls/ https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2012/03/13/why-does-jenkins-have... I still don't forgive Jenkins for giving in and replacing blue with green.
bluejekyll 3y ago
One thing I discovered when buying some custom plates made from old traffic signals was that while the glass for red and yellow were obviously those colors, the glass for “green” was actually blue. They appear green because of the warmer light that incandescent bulbs give off. I imagine that things transition to LED they’ll choose warmer light frequencies to continue this effect? https://mytrafficlights.com/why-does-the-green-lens-on-my-traffic-light-look-blue/ https://mytrafficlights.com/why-does-the-green-lens-on-my-tr...
bane 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction... Color in general can be subjective, even between people of the same culture and language group. There's an interesting experiment with color in this video around yellow lasers that might help get the idea across. https://youtu.be/XQnmMjYHgcM https://youtu.be/XQnmMjYHgcM
okonomiyaki3000 3y ago
They are green. Japanese people just call them blue (青). The colors we call green and blue are just ranges on a spectrum. Where you draw the line between them to call one green and the other blue is partially a matter of personal perception and maybe more a matter of culture but there is no absolute right answer. I'm not sure if there's any connection to why Japanese tend to lean towards blue rather than green but the Japanese word for green, midori (緑) is linguistically different from most other colors. It doesn't have a true adjective form and is instead used as a noun or "adjectival noun". Does this difference create a subconscious aversion to it in the Japanese psyche? I really have no idea.
- rhplus 3y ago
  We also call traffic lights “green” in North America and Europe, but if you look carefully they’re actually in the “cyan” color family, much closer to turquoise or aquamarine than a green. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors
Waterluvian 3y ago
It’s interesting (and unsurprising) that regions that are geographically isolated (islands) are more likely to have unusual road and traffic characteristics.
standardUser 3y ago
To this day I insist that American traffic lights are red, orange and green. I know what yellow looks like and that is not yellow, it is orange. As a child, I couldn't understand the concept of calling it yellow despite it emitting orange light. Now, I understand the concept of colloquially referring to things by incorrect names, but I still hate it.
- ztetranz 3y ago
  In New Zealand the middle light is (or at least was) called amber. Now I live in the US and the lights here look the same as NZ but I'm pretty badly colorblind so they're just words to me :) Horizontal rather than vertical lights were new to me here. They make sense because they don't swing around in the wind.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
  The concept of "red = stop" and "yellow = slow" existed prior to electricity and artificial light: in rail transportation, a yellow flag meant proceed with caution. When traffic lights were first created, they simply didn't have the technology to create a great pure yellow, so amber was used instead, and people understood the color they were aiming for.
  - standardUser 3y ago
    Makes sense, since Yield signs and similar warning signs are all yellow as well. But being born into a world where everyone calls an orange light yellow is confusing nonetheless!
- glandium 3y ago
  In France, it's called orange.
arjie 3y ago
It's a nice article and has lots of details. But I searched my photo history for Japan and here are the first few that have traffic lights in them: https://imgur.com/a/S815y7o https://imgur.com/a/S815y7o This should help you determine what colour the lights are in your perception. Some are taken with a Canon DSLR and some are taken with a Pixel 3.
- kitebive 3y ago
  Nice photos!
  - arjie 3y ago
    Thank you :)
water9 3y ago
Alaska has blue traffic lights sometimes as well
figital 3y ago
I sell traffic lights. What you consider a “green” light in the USA is actually called “blue green”. I believe the reason for this is increased visibility for older drivers.
- bluedevil2k 3y ago
  It’s for red/green colorblind people. Obviously you don’t want someone who can’t tell the difference between red and green while driving.
FalconSensei 3y ago
> Even then, midori was considered a shade of ao. As you can imagine, this sudden switch-over had lasting effects in Japan. One of the most popular forms of Japanese wordplay is numeric substitution—writing numerals in place of words or letters with the same phonetic value. Mad that they just add the numbers thing there, but never mention if there's a number play with green/blue
kitebive 3y ago
This comment section is full of interesting topics and comments, thank you very much! I'm glad this story started such a wonderful discussion!

192 points by kitebive 3y ago

In Salamanca (Spain) there are some old traffic lights that they have blue (not a full blue more or less a half step between green and blue) color too. I think that they turned to blue for things of years and years of sun rays and raining and other climate things.

kirea 3y ago

Although the color of traffic lights is determined to be green, there is a reason why they are called green lights in Japan. The green color used in traffic lights in Japan is the closest to blue (blue-green) within the range of CIE regulations in consideration of people with color blindness, and historically, the green color used in Japanese traffic lights is One reason is that the range of "blue" is wide.

acadapter 3y ago

Color blindness compatible design is, IMO, a very neglected part of the equality debate, in many other fields. This disability has a very skewed gender ratio due to how it works genetically.

mathieuh 3y ago
Traffic lights are still fine for colour-blind people aren't they? The order of the lights doesn't change.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  Night time?
  - Xerox9213 3y ago
    Also lights with more than three bulbs, some indicating left or right turns, of which will take on two or more colours themselves. Some lights have a bulb above red for cyclists and transit. Some lights called beacons are a single bulb that take on several colours. https://www.ontario.ca/document/official-mto-drivers-handbook/traffic-lights https://www.ontario.ca/document/official-mto-drivers-handboo...
- smolder 3y ago
  Yes. They can still drive fine, but don't get the benefits of color coding, like being able to infer whether red or green is lit from the light reflected off of other objects. That becomes somewhat important in low visibility situations where the position is hard to determine.
  - teruakohatu 3y ago
    It seems the harder difficulty is red and yellow, see the comments in this article, but led lights have improved the situation for some: https://www.color-blindness.com/2007/02/06/colorblind-at-the-traffic-light/ https://www.color-blindness.com/2007/02/06/colorblind-at-the...
    - NegativeK 3y ago
      There are a few different types of colorblindness, so I wouldn't extrapolate that. For me personally, the green light looks much closer to a white than to, say, the green of a grass.
    - smolder 3y ago
      I just happen to have a friend with red-green blindness, who was my reference point in answering. It's good to point out there are different types with different impacts, though.
- Toutouxc 3y ago
  Funny thing, I'm NOT colorblind and apparently I only rely on the color. I've been driving for over 10 years now, mostly in the capital that has traffic lights everywhere, and sitting at my desk now not looking at a traffic light, I wouldn't want to bet money on the order.
  - city41 3y ago
    I always assumed red was at the top as it's the most important. It's the first one to peak out behind tall trucks.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Some places have the lights sideways, and usually red is on the left, but it's not always consistent. If I were designing them I'd always have the red be noticeably larger.
- omgwtfbyobbq 3y ago
  It depends on their kind of colorblindness. I see green lights as white, which is fine most of the time because of the order. The exception is when there's a lot of glare from the sun setting behind me, and I sometimes can't tell if it's green, or just the sun reflecting at the right angle. It also washes out the red and yellow, making it harder to see if they're lit.
  - Finnucane 3y ago
    I am the same--green traffic lights are nearly white. Normally, it's enough to know it's not the red or yellow light. Sometimes at night--face with an array of white lights in the distance--it can be an issue. At my last eye test at the RMV, the clerk tried to tell me I wasn't color blind. I mean, sure, I've been able to drive with it for 40 years, but I know damn well I'm color blind.
- nemetroid 3y ago
  Horizontal lights are not consistent across countries. The linked article has an image of a Japanese horizontal traffic light with red on the right, whereas an American traffic light would have red on the left.
  - lozenge 3y ago
    And some countries don't have horizontal lights at all. https://youtu.be/sXbHdKJ1D78 https://youtu.be/sXbHdKJ1D78
    - LeonidasXIV 3y ago
      I don't think I've ever seen horizontal lights in Europe at all. Fairly common in Japan though.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Which is even worse. I grew up in an area with only vertical lights. After several years of driving I ended up in an area with a horizontal light, one end was white and I had no clue if that meant stop or go. (I'm colorblind so I normally think top=stop, bottom=go)
- watwut 3y ago
  Most color blind have issue to see shades and subtle differences. They see red and green just fine. The people who do not see red at all however, see red as black. So, they do not see red traffic light at all.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > The order of the lights doesn't change. For 3 lights streetlights no. For 2 lights streetlights it depends. They can be (in DE) either red and yellow or yellow or green.
  - iggldiggl 3y ago
    AFAIK yellow + green is only ever used for turning traffic and is always installed together with a regular 3-bulb traffic light for the other directions. Stand-alone two-bulb traffic lights are always red + yellow, with red on top, just as usual.
- perilunar 3y ago
  With the switch from incandescent bulbs to LED traffic lights it would be very easy to change the shape of the lights: e.g. octagonal for stop, triangular for caution, and circular for go. Keep the colors, but add shape as well. Seems like an obvious and useful change to me.
  - NegativeK 3y ago
    That might fall apart for people with poor visual acuity.
    - blincoln 3y ago
      If they're roughly the same size and in the same order as the round lights today, people with poor visual acuity would still see more or less what they see currently.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      If you can tell neither the color of the light, nor its shape... Should you be driving?
- cafard 3y ago
  Almost fifty years ago, I worked with a guy who was color-blind. This was in Colorado, where at the time some of the little towns in the mountains still had traffic lights arranged horizontally rather than vertically. He must have known the order at one time--I think I learned it for my license test--but of course with little chance for reinforcement tended to forget. I suppose that such lights are all gone now.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    They're common in at least four states still: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXbHdKJ1D78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXbHdKJ1D78
- izolate 3y ago
  > The order of the lights doesn't change. That argument has two issues: First, not all US traffic lights have order, as single-light ones replace stop signs in some (mostly suburban/rural) areas. Second, light position is still hard to discern at night. My personal take: the red and yellow hues in traffic lights are often indistinguishable for those of us with red-green colorblindness.
Prcmaker 3y ago
I learned this lesson in my first ever public lecture. Approximately 10% of my audience had some form of colour blindness, rendering the majority of my figures incapable of communicating their intent. Since then I have rendered all figures for public consumption in black and white, and lines instead of surfaces where possible.
- quietbritishjim 3y ago
  Depending on what exactly your figures were/are, you might benefit from the viridis colour map, available in matplotlib and R (and probably in many other places). It's colourful, so those without colour blindness get a richer display than if you used greyscale, and the colours chosen aren't too affected by most common forms of colour blindness. But for those that really can't see the colours, even if you literally just convert to monochrome, it still works. It also looks nice :-) Here's a talk by the creators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU Here's a little article about it (with some R specifics): https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/intro-to-viridis.html https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/in...
  - f33d5173 3y ago
    Am I wrong that in that article magma appears to do better? Particularly in the last two (red-blind and grayscale), it seems like viridis looks the same for large parts of the scale, while magma retains its distinction.
    - quietbritishjim 3y ago
      I think it just won the poll [1] because it subjectively looks nicer. NJS, in that video, said something like: I don't care which wins, they're all so much better than the current situation. But magma is a good choice too and it's also available in matplotlib. [1] http://bids.github.io/colormap/ http://bids.github.io/colormap/
- reportgunner 3y ago
  Android has a colorblind developer option in the settings you can use to quickly check how it might look for others. I just turn that on, open the camera and look at my color pallete through the camera.
bluGill 3y ago
Most green lights in the US have a blue tint so that color blind people can see the blue. Most but not all, which is really frustrating as a colorblind person. More than once I've been sitting at a light until my wife told me it was green as there is one light near me without that blue tint. (we are making a left turn so light has both the round red stop light and the green left turn arrow on at the same time)
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  There is no clicking/hum that distinguishes those 2 states? If that's the case, you should probably check with council to have those nearby lights changed into disability-friendly setup. You may be surprised how effective it may be, maybe council has some part of the budget allocated to this so they will give it higher priority (or not, but at least try, you can help other people too)
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    Crosswalk lights in the US may have audio but usually not the roadway lights, and depending on the jurisdiction the crosswalk may not always get the light at the same time as the roadway, not to mention that you may not hear it if you are at the centermost lane of a road four or five lanes wide in each direction.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    There is for pedestrians, but when I'm in my car with the windows closed I can't hear them.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure the international agreement on road signaling completely forbids any stop and go light from being on the same place, so that you can distinguish them without depending on any color. But well, the US never follows any agreement it signs, so yeah, that happens.
  - bluGill 3y ago

twic 3y ago

The Reader's Digest article is just a mediocre summary of the Atlas Obscura one it links to: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-green-traffic-lights-blue https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-green-traffic-li... Although the latter does contain a complete misrepresentation of what "grue" means. The explanation is still unsatisfying. Japan had green lights, referred to in law by a word which means blue but has traditionally encompassed green as well. Pedants pointed out that it would be better if the law explicitly said green. Rather than changing the law or letting things be, the government ordered lights be changed to blue-green. This is, on the face of it, completely insane behaviour, but neither article attempts to explain why the government did this.

sylware 3y ago
[flagged]
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Huh, AO reads fine in w3m. Like many apparent JS-only websites (e.g. Medium), they seem to serve JS-free content if you pass a user agent that doesn't suggest JS-compatibility. https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/w3m-ao.png https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/w3m-ao.png
- pzmarzly 3y ago
  AO may not work for you, but OP's link to rd.com doesn't work for me - I'm getting some difficult captchas from cloudflare that don't let me visit that site.
  - lopis 3y ago
    For those that are as confused as me, in the comment above "ao" refers to "Atlas Obscura" not to blue in Japanese.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Are you on a VPN or Tor by chance?

second_brekkie 3y ago

Maybe Korea also had blue traffic lights in the past. But they still call green traffic lights 'blue' even though all of them use a green coloured light. I think the use of blue to mean both blue and green has also been present in Korea for a long time. I wonder where it came from? In my limited experience if Korea and Japan share something culturally it often has its common derivation in Chineese tradition.

iopq 3y ago
Both come from the Chinese term 青 which in modern Chinese would by itself refer to colors anywhere between sky blue and grassy green 青天 - clear skies 青草 - green grass 清葡萄 - 청포도 - white grape
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  As vague as 青 might be, I'd have to allow that it's a more accurate description of the color of a grape than "white" is.

tnbp 3y ago

I used to wonder, as a kid, why most traffic lights in my region of Germany were red, orange-yellow and obviously turquoise. I remember drawing traffic lights (I loved drawing road layouts when I was young) without any use for the green pen. Nowadays, they all seem to be very much green, at least the new LED ones.

TylerE 3y ago
I’d say here in the US the LEDs skew much more blue than the incandeswnts they replace. Almost a teal.

schappim 3y ago

TL;DR: The traditional Japanese language did not have separate words for green and blue; instead, it used a single term "青" (ao) to cover both colours. Over time, the language evolved, but the initial categorisation of green as a type of blue stuck around in certain contexts, like traffic signals. This linguistic trait led to the designation of traffic signals that are green in colour as "青信号" (ao shingou), which literally translates to "blue signal."

dotancohen 3y ago

I believe that Greek, too, lacks a word for blue. Modern Greek speakers just use the English word blue as "mple" where "mp" stands in for the B sound which has no distinct letter in modern Greek.

Tistron 3y ago
Surprised me, and I wondered what sound Beta signifies in modern Greek. Apparently /v/.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  In Modern Greek, the voiced plosives of Ancient Greek, i.e. beta, delta and gamma, have become voiced fricatives, while the aspirated plosives of Ancient Greek have become voiceless fricatives. To deal with the voiced plosives that are present in many modern loanwords, from languages like English, they had to develop ways to write them, using the existing letters of their alphabet, and the solution was to use digraphs, like "mp" for English "b".
  - dotancohen 3y ago
    Thank you. How do modern Greek speakers pronounce the ancient words? With the new sounds, or the old sounds? Are there many ancient words in modern Greek?
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      I do not know if this remains true nowadays, but in the past most Modern Greek speakers pronounced the ancient words with the modern pronunciation, because this is how it was taught in schools, despite the fact that the Ancient Greek pronunciation was very different. This is the same like with the Latin language used by the Catholic Church, which traditionally had a modern pronunciation very unlike Ancient Latin, or how the Latin was traditionally taught in English schools, also with a modern pronunciation unlike the ancient pronunciation. In the last half of century, in many places the teaching of ancient languages has switched to using pronunciations as close as possible to what is known about the ancient pronunciations, but I do not know if this has also happened in Greece. The Modern Greek has replaced many ancient words with more recent loanwords, but as a reaction to this they have created a form of the language, Katharevousa, which was purged from many loanwords and which used a high proportion of Ancient Greek words. Katharevousa was used for many literary works in the past and it was the official language of Greece since independence until 1976. I do not know if there is still much use of Katharevousa for anything, except for reading the older books and other publications that have used it.

mgaunard 3y ago

They speak of this as if it was a Japan-only thing. The blue-green distinction is a late feature of most languages. Even Greek and Latin did not have as clear a distinction as we have today.

the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
> They speak of this as if it was a Japan-only thing. Which other countries have blue traffic lights?
- iopq 3y ago
  In China, for example, the word for green 綠 is used for the light 綠 is used in Japanese for the color of green tea, but they use 青 for the green light There's also 翠 in Japanese to mean a bright green, which in Chinese also has a blue connotation (based on the color of the kingfisher who dives 淬 to catch fish)
  - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
    I'm not doubting that multiple languages have that aspect to it, but as far as I know that does not result in blue traffic lights. I have not heard of an instance of a blue traffic light in China to go with your Chinese example.
    - iopq 3y ago
      Because they use 绿, not 青 so it would not result in blue lights But in Korea they have the same confusion: https://www.dreamstime.com/traffic-lights-road-blue-speed-limit-signs-south-korea-image235489567 https://www.dreamstime.com/traffic-lights-road-blue-speed-li...
      - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
        To the best of my knowledge it's different in Korea. As far as I know the call it blue lights but they are green.

wrp 3y ago

As mentioned, aoi ringo (blue apple) is a common term. When I moved to Japan many years ago, on my first visit to a McDonald's, I was initially excited then let down by the prospect of getting a "blue apple" milkshake.

sleepy_keita 3y ago

This reminds me of when I took my drivers' license test in Japan -- they'll do an eye exam including whether you can recognize the colors. The first color was this weird mix between blue and green, and when the administrator asked me what color was showing, it took me a moment to try to find a word to describe the color... then I realized, I'm at the DMV, they want "ao", so that's what I said.

skhr0680 3y ago
I passed that with flying colors by saying グリーン

tdiggity 3y ago

as other comments have pointed out, this also happens with other east asian languages. vietnamese is another one.

yznlp 3y ago

Not a linguist. I feel like this is just an issue of imperfect correspondence between the word "blue" in English and "ao" in Japanese. The article explains the historical reason why ao encompasses both blue and green, so I think the concept of semantic field comes into play here. As an analogy, a MacBook is a type of laptop, and laptops, desktops and tablets are all IT devices (for lack of a better word). Apple might have you believe that a MacBook is very different from a laptop and belongs in its own category, but to me I would still lump it under laptops. If I was presented with a MacBook, a desktop and a tablet and was asked to pick out the laptop, then it would be clear to me that the MacBook is the correct choice. Now, midori (green) is a type of ao ("grue"), and ao, kiiro (yellow) and aka (red) are all colours. English speakers argue that green is very different from blue and that they're different colours, but to Japanese speakers ao encompasses midori. If a Japanese speaker was presented with the colours green, yellow and red and was asked to pick out ao (in the context of traffic lights), then it would be clear that green is the correct choice. There are loads of situations where words in two languages seem to directly correspond to each other, but still they are subtly different especially when the nuances of the words are considered.

troad 3y ago
I trained as a linguist and you hit the nail on the head. Word meanings are fuzzy clouds of references and nuances, and every language has slightly different clouds. There is nothing magical about this, despite the recurrent lizard-brain notion that words or names are somehow mystical and intrinsic, and that these differences must somehow be meaningful. Differences are quite common with colour terms - you don’t need to go to Japanese (blue-green) or Ancient Greek (wine dark sea) for this. My own (European) first language draws a slightly different word cloud around the colours pink and purple than English does, for example. One word is only for hot pink, and the other is for purple and non-hot pinks. I assure you I see these colours the same as you do. If I were to use the English word “purple” to refer to more of a pink hue, it would be a mere language interference error, not some mystical Saphir-Whorf insight into the culturally-conditioned operation of my retinas. Words are not perception. This is such a pernicious bit of nonsense, and journalists and writers are especially susceptible to it because it flatters them, in their role as word-smiths. Languages are way more interesting than this pseudo-intellectual mysticism. The Japanese are just as capable of distinguishing blue and green as anyone else, and they use blue traffic lights for the same reason they drive on the left - because it doesn’t actually matter what convention they pick, so long as everyone agrees on it and sticks to it.

psychoslave 3y ago

Common, not a single mention of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://www.verywellmind.com/the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-7565585 https://www.verywellmind.com/the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-7565...

troad 3y ago
No, because it is discredited pseudo-science.
- psychoslave 3y ago
  Even taking this as premise, it doesn’t mean it should not be mentioned. Knowledge that some hypothesis where disproved is also crucially important to understating and formation of sounder models. Regarding the adequacy of the assertion itself, every reader should judge by themselves to which level it extends.

quickthrower2 3y ago

Shame the Readers Digest has gone for such a modern bland looking site, and dropped their classic logo.

chx 3y ago

There's an amazing book on the naming of colors and more: Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher.

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> Hundreds of years ago, the Japanese language included words for only four basic colors: black, white, red, and blue. If you wanted to describe something green, you’d use the word for blue—“ao”—and that system worked well enough until roughly the end of the first millennium, when the word “midori” (originally meaning “sprout”) began showing up in writing to describe what we know as green. There's something going on here that the article doesn't explain. The new word is written 緑, which is also [the Japanese simplified spelling of] the Chinese word that means green in specific. But the Chinese word has always referred to a color, and it's never meant "sprout" -- the shuowen jiezi, written 800 years before the period the article indicates, defines it "帛靑黃色也"! So by the time this word is being written down, there is no sense of the concept "sprout" at all. The article seems to present this as a case of conceptual innovation internal to Japanese, which would have been much cooler than the apparent reality of the Japanese starting to use an already well-established concept more often. Now I want to know why, if midori originally meant "sprout", it does not seem to have the spelling 芽 ("sprout" - 萌芽也) as a possibility...?

themaninthedark 3y ago
That explanation seems wrong to me, when you refer to sprout like things i.e. spring leaves on trees you use 青葉 - blue leaves. https://kotobank-jp.translate.goog/word/%E9%9D%92%E8%91%89-24156?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://kotobank-jp.translate.goog/word/%E9%9D%92%E8%91%89-2...
erutuon 3y ago
As far as I can tell from Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B7%91#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B7%91#Japanese), though I don't speak Japanese, the Japanese word midori has had the meaning "bud" or "sprout", but the Chinese words written with the same character don't. Spelling and word identity are distinct. This confuses me sometimes when looking up Japanese words.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Spelling and word identity are distinct. What I'm saying is: 1. If "midori" began with the meaning "sprout", then... 2. its spelling in early texts should have been 芽 [sprout] and not 綠 [green]. The spellings were fixed a long time before the article identifies the change as taking place. The Japanese spelling of a word must develop by either (1) the Japanese borrowing a Chinese word with the meaning of the Japanese word; (2) option #1, but the Japanese meaning of the word later shifts; (3) option #1, but the Japanese spelling of the word later shifts [this would be weird]; (4) indigenous innovation of a character; or (5) refusal to use a character at all. "Midori" appears to have begun its life by being spelled as if it meant "green" and to have continued to mean "green" since that time. This is strange if it originally meant "sprout", and I'd like to know more about the claim and the history.

woolion 3y ago

If you read any Chinese/Japanese literature, for example Buddhist or zen texts, it is very common to encounter very weird uses of the words blue or green-- because they mean things that somebody used to these distinct categories will classify nature according to these boxes. Trees are green, bodies of water blue -- even if that is more complex than that, some pines can be very blue, rivers or lakes can be much greener than blue, etc. Some translators avoid this issue by always using the term "blue/green", which is really awkward, and I couldn't find any explanation for it before learning about "the crayola-ification of the world" [0]. Before I thought that was a poetic literary device. It is really hard not to think of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis when learning about this. At the same time, taoist philosophy tends to point out that misery comes from our mind's discriminating eye; everything is categorized in boxes, good and bad, concept and not-concept. Maybe having more categories is better from a technical standpoint, but more difficult to handle from a spiritual standpoint? At the same time, this spiritual view tend to see man as needing to overcome his beastly nature, and thus this added technical discrimination is not burden since it is simply part of the path towards a higher level of consciousness? [0] https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our-brains-part-i/ https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of...

wolverine876 3y ago
> because they mean things that somebody used to these distinct categories will classify nature according to these boxes. Very interesting. Could you explain this part in a little more detail?
- woolion 3y ago
  I'm not sure I'll answer properly but I'm thinking of how information retrieval works in the brain and how similar it is to word vectors and heatmaps. There is a well known trick (I don't know if there's actual research behind) that when asked for a tool and a color, people will answer red hammer. There are many tools and colors but these come to mind quickly because they are so frequent, simple, etc. Therefore the concept used for information retrieval implicitly creates a set of all possible words that satisfy it. For instance "bird" will make the person think of pigeons, sparrows, crows, so it naturally implies "flight". It's only by precising either "flightless" or a specific flightless bird that the association is removed. The implication goes both ways: flightless birds tend to not come to mind, despite chickens being extremely common. Furthermore, it is quite counterintuitive to just take arbitrary conjunction of categories (e.g. a bird or a chair). By comparison, discriminating further is very easy, and people tend to be able to much easier think of different elements of the same subcategory (e.g. different breeds of pigeons). Koans tend to revolve around erroneous thought or language patterns, and so having the "blue or green" category was an obvious example of falling into either of my known boxes (blue or green) before being reminded that the concept encompassed both.

cxrlosfx 3y ago

Red cabbage or Blue Cabagge, in northern Germany is also called red cabbage (Rotkohl), same color for some regions of Austria and Switzerland (Rotkraut). In southern Germany it is called Blue Cabagge (Blaukraut). If you ask people in Germany what the color of the vegetable is, they will answer "purple" (lila). There are some strange ways in the evolution of a language, depending on the region and events in the region. It's normal, whatever normal means in this case, to think that a color is the same as a similar hue, in my example above, between red and blue you can find purple, violet "lilac" hues. As a personal anecdote, the name for (orange) carrot in Southern Bavarian dialect is Gelberübe, Rübe for root vegetable and Gelb for yellow, also yellow is connected with orange in the brain and the language of the people. A purple carrot has the honor to be called "lilane GelbeRübe", or purple yellow vegetable root in English.

Findecanor 3y ago
Red cabbage is a bit of a weird example because its colour depends first on the acidity/basicity of the soil it was grown in, and then when you're using it on the acidity of other ingredients. For example, if you cook it with apple (which is acidic), it will turn redder.
jeroenhd 3y ago
I don't think this distinction stems from the same source. Blue/green distinction is a clear step in linguistic development that happened in different stages for different civilisations, but they're more of a result of linguistic developments, local available colours, and manufacturing capability than a reference to plants. This particular cabbage is coloured by a chemical that responds to the pH of the stuff it comes into contact with. The colour can range from quite bright red to quite clear blue, and even green or yellow. It's perfectly possible for the red cabbages to be turned into blue dishes, and the pH of the soil will also have a large effect on the colour produced by the plant. You can see on various stock photos how the plant has a clear blue hue (before harvesting, at least): https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/rotkraut.html?pseudoid=5625F67BAF314E99BCE3348FB2294984&sortBy=relevant https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/rotkraut.html?pseudoid=562... Even ignoring the leaves, the outside of the parts that generally get cooked have a clear blue hue in many pictures I can see. The reason "lila" wasn't used to describe the cabbage is that the German language lacked a word for it. It entered the German vocabulary somewhere in the 19th century (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lila#German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lila#German). In a similar fashion, there was no separate word for orange in many European languages until somewhere around the 15th-16th century, when oranges (the fruit) were starting to get imported. You had yellow-red and other hue combinations, but it wasn't as separate as it is today. I'm sure there were people who used "Rotblaukohl", but it makes sense that only one colour remained. As for the carrot, orange carrots were actually not all the common for centuries. The original plants now known as carrots were imported to Europe from the middle east and cultivated in the Netherlands, but orange carrots weren't all that common in Europe before the 16th/17th century. The base plant of the orange carrot was actually white/yellow and got its orange outside hue quite some time later, after selective breeding. I wouldn't be surprised if the carrots that were first exported to modern German areas were still yellow in colour. Gelbrübe for orange carrots makes a lot of sense, historically. I do like the "purple yellow root" name, especially since the first carrot cultivars to reach Europe (long before orange/yellow carrots) were actually purple. I don't think they received quite the popularity carrots received, at least not much further north than the Mediterranean.

workfromspace 3y ago

https://archive.ph/uj03N https://archive.ph/uj03N (rd.com requires JS)

cthalupa 3y ago

Other people have covered the linguistic aspect enough so no need for me to rehash it, but, the picture in that article is far more blue than any traffic light I've seen in Tokyo in my months there. If I had to describe them with a single word, I'd choose green without hesitation - they just have a bit of a blue tinge to them. Some example photos from google image that look closest to what I've seen: https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/129881591-traffic-lights-changing-signal-shibuya-crossing-tokyo-japan https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/129881591-traffic-l... https://depositphotos.com/editorial/traffic-lights-ginza-district-tokyo-japan-325410734.html https://depositphotos.com/editorial/traffic-lights-ginza-dis... I've not really left Kantō so maybe they are more likely to be more prominently blue elsewhere? Kansai and Hokkaidō google image searches show (mostly) green traffic lights too.

city41 3y ago
The article seems to imply outside of Tokyo with "Elsewhere around the island" and perhaps "Drive around Japan long enough". It would be nice if the article was more specific here, but it's also just a Reader's Digest summary.
bombcar 3y ago
I've seen almost-blue stop lights (go lights?) in the USA, and before everything was LED the color variation between various lights was pretty wide. You could almost always figure it out in context, but absolutely speaking some red lights were almost as yellow as some other light's yellow.
deleted 3y ago
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kouru225 3y ago
I’ve seen very blue traffic lights in Japan both in Kyoto and Tokyo. I think the weirdest part of this story that isn’t talked about in the article is that Japan doesn’t seem to have any regulation or consistency defining which shade of blue/green the traffic light should be. Different areas will have different colors and even the same area will have different colors.

2143 3y ago

Just a data point that I want to put out there. I have long heard that Japan has blue traffic lights. Earlier this year I visited Japan. Because I had heard about the blue traffic light situation, I paid special attention to the traffic lights. They all appeared green to me. In both Tokyo and Osaka. Okay maybe a tinge of blue if you look at it and wonder 'is this blue?', but the only reason I wondered was because I had heard the blue traffic light trivia. If I had never heard about it I wouldn't have given it a second thought. However, the picture in the linked article seems to have an unmistakable blue color; I don't understand what's going on. Beautiful country by the way; would love to visit again :)

vages 3y ago
I am looking out my hotel room window in Hiroshima in this very instant, and I even got my wife to confirm it: The traffic lights definitely are GREEN.
- doubled112 3y ago
  I'm glad you mentioned that you had your wife confirm, because I'm convinced my wife sees more colours than I do, and I can't be the only one. I've had this exact discussion. What colour is this? Blue. No, can't you see it's green? Maybe it has some green in it Okay, so is it blue or green? Yes! Why did you ask me then?
  - Izkata 3y ago
    Maybe not more colors, but more easily distinguishes them: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brain-babble/201504/when-it-comes-to-color-men-women-arent-seeing-eye-to-eye https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brain-babble/20150... This is different from tetrachromacy, where some women really do see more colors: https://www.optimax.co.uk/blog/tetrachromacy-superhuman-vision/ https://www.optimax.co.uk/blog/tetrachromacy-superhuman-visi...
    - galangalalgol 3y ago

joeconway 3y ago

As a British person living in the USA I often enjoy that the line between blue and green shades definitely differs between cultures and there are certain shades of teal that US/UK folks will strongly disagree on. I’ve since noticed that I think this question of where “that is definitely green” ends and “that is obviously blue” begins is different for lots of countries

dghughes 3y ago
I also find it fascinating that cultures have so many words for colours or so few words for colours either way it's interesting. Here is a good video on colour and how many cultures perceive colour and name them, or not. "The surprising pattern behind color names around the world" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg&t=35s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg&t=35s

upofadown 3y ago

If you go out and buy LEDs for use in a traffic signal in North America, you will have to specify the colour as "cyan". That is because the monochromatic wavelength sits in the place between green and blue. So the same sort of situation in naming occurs in that part of the world too. You can call the colour green, but you could just as legitimately call the colour blue. It really just ends up being a convention.

creade 3y ago

I don't know if its a urban legend or not, but I always heard that this was the upstream cause this plugin [1] in jenkins being a day one install on teams I was on [1] https://plugins.jenkins.io/greenballs/ https://plugins.jenkins.io/greenballs/

dogleash 3y ago
Yep. https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2012/03/13/why-does-jenkins-have-blue-balls/ https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2012/03/13/why-does-jenkins-have... I still don't forgive Jenkins for giving in and replacing blue with green.

bluejekyll 3y ago

One thing I discovered when buying some custom plates made from old traffic signals was that while the glass for red and yellow were obviously those colors, the glass for “green” was actually blue. They appear green because of the warmer light that incandescent bulbs give off. I imagine that things transition to LED they’ll choose warmer light frequencies to continue this effect? https://mytrafficlights.com/why-does-the-green-lens-on-my-traffic-light-look-blue/ https://mytrafficlights.com/why-does-the-green-lens-on-my-tr...

bane 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction... Color in general can be subjective, even between people of the same culture and language group. There's an interesting experiment with color in this video around yellow lasers that might help get the idea across. https://youtu.be/XQnmMjYHgcM https://youtu.be/XQnmMjYHgcM

okonomiyaki3000 3y ago

They are green. Japanese people just call them blue (青). The colors we call green and blue are just ranges on a spectrum. Where you draw the line between them to call one green and the other blue is partially a matter of personal perception and maybe more a matter of culture but there is no absolute right answer. I'm not sure if there's any connection to why Japanese tend to lean towards blue rather than green but the Japanese word for green, midori (緑) is linguistically different from most other colors. It doesn't have a true adjective form and is instead used as a noun or "adjectival noun". Does this difference create a subconscious aversion to it in the Japanese psyche? I really have no idea.

rhplus 3y ago
We also call traffic lights “green” in North America and Europe, but if you look carefully they’re actually in the “cyan” color family, much closer to turquoise or aquamarine than a green. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors

Waterluvian 3y ago

It’s interesting (and unsurprising) that regions that are geographically isolated (islands) are more likely to have unusual road and traffic characteristics.

standardUser 3y ago

To this day I insist that American traffic lights are red, orange and green. I know what yellow looks like and that is not yellow, it is orange. As a child, I couldn't understand the concept of calling it yellow despite it emitting orange light. Now, I understand the concept of colloquially referring to things by incorrect names, but I still hate it.

ztetranz 3y ago
In New Zealand the middle light is (or at least was) called amber. Now I live in the US and the lights here look the same as NZ but I'm pretty badly colorblind so they're just words to me :) Horizontal rather than vertical lights were new to me here. They make sense because they don't swing around in the wind.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
The concept of "red = stop" and "yellow = slow" existed prior to electricity and artificial light: in rail transportation, a yellow flag meant proceed with caution. When traffic lights were first created, they simply didn't have the technology to create a great pure yellow, so amber was used instead, and people understood the color they were aiming for.
- standardUser 3y ago
  Makes sense, since Yield signs and similar warning signs are all yellow as well. But being born into a world where everyone calls an orange light yellow is confusing nonetheless!
glandium 3y ago
In France, it's called orange.

arjie 3y ago

It's a nice article and has lots of details. But I searched my photo history for Japan and here are the first few that have traffic lights in them: https://imgur.com/a/S815y7o https://imgur.com/a/S815y7o This should help you determine what colour the lights are in your perception. Some are taken with a Canon DSLR and some are taken with a Pixel 3.

kitebive 3y ago
Nice photos!
- arjie 3y ago
  Thank you :)

water9 3y ago

Alaska has blue traffic lights sometimes as well

figital 3y ago

I sell traffic lights. What you consider a “green” light in the USA is actually called “blue green”. I believe the reason for this is increased visibility for older drivers.

bluedevil2k 3y ago
It’s for red/green colorblind people. Obviously you don’t want someone who can’t tell the difference between red and green while driving.

FalconSensei 3y ago

> Even then, midori was considered a shade of ao. As you can imagine, this sudden switch-over had lasting effects in Japan. One of the most popular forms of Japanese wordplay is numeric substitution—writing numerals in place of words or letters with the same phonetic value. Mad that they just add the numbers thing there, but never mention if there's a number play with green/blue

kitebive 3y ago

This comment section is full of interesting topics and comments, thank you very much! I'm glad this story started such a wonderful discussion!