When I came to Japan the first few times I knew almost no Japanese and tried to pick up a few words by listening to other people talking. Standing in front of a traffic light I heard children saying 赤 赤 赤 青 (aka aka aka ao) – so I learned that red was aka and green was ao. Or so I thought. Later I have come to learn that ao actually means blue and 緑 (midori) means green. And thinking about this has been a constant on-off companion of mine, wondering why in the world people call something green blue.
I have come up with many different ideas as to the etymology of this, one being that the inventor was colorblind, another that it is simply easier to say ao than midori since looking at the green light with a kind eye can make it almost appear blue sometimes (yes, a very very kind eye). But then the other day I found what must be the origin of all traffic lights and suddenly everything made sense to me – there it was, the red and blue traffic light staring straight at me, letting me know that I had finally arrived in my quest for an answer. It even had a contrasting green background to really emphasize the blueness of the light.
Discovering this museum quality historically important traffic light (in the small world of this particular shufu that is) gave me new hope when it comes to mastering the colors in Japanese enough to be able to have a conversation with my son about traffic lights when he grows older. (Ok, maybe I might need to do a web-search-deep-dive to find the true reason behind this as well, but for now I do not want to destroy my explanation – I like it far too much.) My son has just started to name all the colors he sees when we are out walking, so I guess he will be more than confused when he starts to think about the colors of traffic lights.
– Dad, why is green called blue?
– Oh you know my son, a long time ago, before there were traffic lights everywhere, there was this one very very blue traffic light. It was the bluest of blue beautifully shining…
– No dad, this light is green, why do you say blue?
Then again, it is a small problem in a big world, and come to think of it green is actually just a warmer shade of blue…
Share this post