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The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?

japantimes.co.jp

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Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?

#41

Post by taneq »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #28
jdshaffer wrote: post #26

I've lived here in Japan for the past 18 years and I still tend to call them "midori", much to my wife and children's amusement. But, the hue of the lights are actually somewhere between the typical USA green lights and a blue. My wife (and kids) swear that it actually is a BLUE-hue light whereas I still see Green. SAME issue with the sun. I say it's yellow, they say it's red, and it's not a kanji issue... $0.02.

Colors are to some degree learned. E.g. if you don't know that the sky is "supposed" to be blue, it's kinda hard to tell. It could also be some grayish white.

That's pollution. It used to be blue. :( It still is if you get far enough away from mechanised civilisation - I was in Laos a decade ago and the sky was an amazing rich blue, and the clouds were pure white.

Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?

#42

Post by i_made_a_booboo »

It's not just the traffic lights in Japan, it's the traffic lights all around the world, if you're a Japanese person. My wife and I always refer to it as blue when speaking Japanese and we live in my home country. It's jus St a cultural norm and the truth is not actually important to human beings, so it doesn't surprise me.

They call grass 'blue' too. There's even a familiar expression with a Japanese twist that goes "The grass is bluer on the other side".

Apparently "blue" used to be a pretty wide range of colors ranging from quite very dark, almost black blues to normal blue and the kind of green that is often referred to as blue. Japanese has a fairly large number of loan words for colors indicating some colors were introduced to their lexicon through contact with foreigners. Pink is an example of that. They have 'sakura-iro' which represents the color of cherry blossoms but it's not a proper representation of pink by itself as you wouldn't use it to refer to say a hot pink.

The level of cognitive dissonance I have to endure every time we're stopped at the lights still irks me.

Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?

#44

Post by JdeBP »

labster wrote: post #4

If you're driving in Japan, you're likely to be eaten by a grue light. That said, we actually mix some blue into modern green lights, so that colorblind people can distinguish the two colors. In official CalTrans terminology, the yellow lights are called "amber lights" -- so we have our own weirdness in the U.S.

The colour-blindness explanation is a bit of a red herring in places outwith Japan.

One can be totally red-green colour blind and still have no problem with traffic lights in the U.K., for example. The stop lights are the ones at the top and the go lights are the ones at the bottom. Colour blindness, after all, does not prevent one from detecting which light is lit.

In countries where there might be both horizontal and vertical arrangements, this would not apply. But the U.K. only permits a single, vertical, layout for traffic lights with stop lights above go ones.

Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?

#45

Post by Sharlin »

taneq wrote: post #41
Double_a_92 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colors are to some degree learned. E.g. if you don't know that the sky is "supposed" to be blue, it's kinda hard to tell. It could also be some grayish white.

That's pollution. It used to be blue. :( It still is if you get far enough away from mechanised civilisation - I was in Laos a decade ago and the sky was an amazing rich blue, and the clouds were pure white.

I don't think you have to get that far away from civilization. I live in a city with >200000 population and it has never occurred to me that a clear sky – particularly near the zenith – could be anything else than completely unambiguously blue.

Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?

#46

Post by DanBC »

JdeBP wrote: post #44
labster wrote: post #4

If you're driving in Japan, you're likely to be eaten by a grue light. That said, we actually mix some blue into modern green lights, so that colorblind people can distinguish the two colors. In official CalTrans terminology, the yellow lights are called "amber lights" -- so we have our own weirdness in the U.S.

The colour-blindness explanation is a bit of a red herring in places outwith Japan. One can be totally red-green colour blind and still have no problem with traffic lights in the U.K., for example. The stop lights are the ones at the top and the go lights are the ones at the bottom . Colour blindness, after all, does not prevent one from detecting which light is lit . In countries where there might be both horizontal…

If it's dark you can't see which light is at the top or bottom. You see a lit light, but can't see the unlit lights.

The black boards with white borders are a relatively recent addition to traffic lights, and they're not fitted to all UK lights, which is why our green has a bit of blue added.

Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?

#47

Post by Sharlin »

pja wrote: post #35

If they use anything like the hue that's used in the UK, it's been pushed a long way towards blue (IIRC the intention was to better accommodate people with red/green color-blindness). You only really see it as explicitly “green” because years of training yourself to see it as green because that's what books depicted it as & that's what everyone called it.

Yeah, it's more like bright cyan in Finland as well (and I think basically everywhere I've been to). Speaking as someone who's red/green colorblind, it's a very good thing.

Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?

#48

Post by rangibaby »

i_made_a_booboo wrote: post #42

It's not just the traffic lights in Japan, it's the traffic lights all around the world, if you're a Japanese person. My wife and I always refer to it as blue when speaking Japanese and we live in my home country. It's jus St a cultural norm and the truth is not actually important to human beings, so it doesn't surprise me. They call grass 'blue' too. There's even a familiar expression with a Japanese twist that goes…

As you discovered 青 is another word for green, they do not actually think that grass is blue.

> Japanese has a fairly large number of loan words for colors indicating some colors were introduced to their lexicon through contact with foreigners.

Orange (橙色） is named after the fruit like in most languages (including English!)

Shades of pink are all named after different flowers, just like the English word. 牡丹色 is pretty close to "hot pink" (although the Japanese word is ショッキングピンク, shocking pink).

Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?

#49

Post by fenomas »

maaark wrote: post #39
jdshaffer wrote: post #26

I've lived here in Japan for the past 18 years and I still tend to call them "midori", much to my wife and children's amusement. But, the hue of the lights are actually somewhere between the typical USA green lights and a blue. My wife (and kids) swear that it actually is a BLUE-hue light whereas I still see Green. SAME issue with the sun. I say it's yellow, they say it's red, and it's not a kanji issue... $0.02.

The sun is white.

Nonsense, it's white or yellow or red or otherwise, depending on the viewer and time of day and weather and whatnot. But the topic here is how people describe things, and in Japan the sun is commonly described as red.

Re: The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what?

#50

Post by fenomas »

i_made_a_booboo wrote: post #42

It's not just the traffic lights in Japan, it's the traffic lights all around the world, if you're a Japanese person. My wife and I always refer to it as blue when speaking Japanese and we live in my home country. It's jus St a cultural norm and the truth is not actually important to human beings, so it doesn't surprise me. They call grass 'blue' too. There's even a familiar expression with a Japanese twist that goes…

Yeah, when this was last on HN I looked into it and apparently 青 historically meant any cool or pale color. The article mentions set phrases where it referred to green, but there are others that don't - 青ざめる (to turn pale), 真っ青 (pallid), etc.

Interestingly, 青 historically applied to such a wide range of cool colors that it survives in contradictory ways - e.g. 青毛 (blue+hair) refers to a black horse, while 青馬 (blue+horse) usually means a white horse.

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