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Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

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Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#241

Post by kipchak »

Arelius wrote: post #190
kipchak wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there might be a language aspect to this, with males in the US generally having less familiarity with words for the in between colors leading to more difficulty distinguishing between them, with people with more words for greenish shades for example having an easier time seeing different shades of green. https://boingboing.net/2011/08/12/how-language-affects-color...

I'd have to dig up references, but I understand it's a pretty well documented effect that having words for colors is directly related to a population seeing more distinction for those colors. If I recall, some early societies didn't have a distinction between green and blue. Given that blue often doesnt show up naturally outside of the sky and it's reflections. And in those populations they would be much less sensiti…

For early societies, you might be thinking of the Greeks, though apparently it's somewhat common between languages?[1] For Greek the idea to originate from Homer's writings, with colors being more described in terms of how light or dark they are versus specific hues.[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer)

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#242

Post by dekhn »

crazygringo wrote: post #104
mcpackieh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In English, things that are orange are often called red. Particularly, but not limited to, hair.

And orange juice is actually yellow. Which really blows some people's minds. "Well it's a little bit orange." No it's not, not your regular American bottled or fresh OJ. Straight-up yellow. (Not denying there are varieties that produce more orange-color juice, like tangerines. But that's not what's on 99% of Americans' breakfast tables.)

Orange juice, like milk, is complicated because it's a suspension and has subsurface scattering, which makes its behavior in different lights very different and much more complicated than "take a picture and check the HSV").

Modern american orange juice looks especially funny because (I thikn) of all the added calcium- it's more of a whitish orange which I find really off-putting.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#243

Post by ensignavenger »

nagisa wrote: post #202
ensignavenger wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been to Japan a couple of times. The first time I was there in 2016 many of the lights were very blue with hint of green. I noticed when I was there over the summer that the lights were getting greener, many of them pretty much just green. I think they have been transitioning, perhaps as they have updated to LED lights or something they have been making them more green?

I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with the Tokyo olympics. Are other cities also green now?

Yes, I was in several other cities and noticed it throughout. Spent half of the summer in Sapporo (my favorite Japanese city so far!) and it was definitely noticeable there.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#244

Post by woolion »

selimthegrim wrote: post #89
woolion wrote: post #47

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 greene…

Do you have any examples of such Zen texts?

I can remember it was a case in a translation of Dogen's works, which may not be the most accessible in the first place.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#245

Post by woolion »

wolverine876 wrote: post #156
woolion wrote: post #47

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 greene…

> 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?

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.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#246

Post by fenomas »

SECProto wrote: post #234
fenomas wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty far off base - for a start, the first JP law on traffic lights in the 1930s used midori, not ao. Per jp references, ao/midori split into distinct meanings around the Heian~Kamakura periods (so 800-1000 years ago).

> for a start, the first JP law on traffic lights in the 1930s used midori, not ao. Have a source for that? This section[1] of the ja.wikipedia article could apparently use your revisions - both kanji are acceptable. [1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%A4%E9%80%9A%E4%BF%A1%E5...

I don't follow. Are you suggesting the link you posted contradicts something I said?

If you want a source that the 1930 law used midori, see here, under 発祥期:

https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E3%81%AE%...

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#247

Post by thaumasiotes »

erutuon wrote: post #200
thaumasiotes wrote: post #46

> 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…

As far as I can tell from Wiktionary ( 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.

> 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.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#248

Post by dragonwriter »

crazygringo wrote: post #194
dragonwriter wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which really blows some people's minds. "Well it's a little bit orange." No it's not, not your regular American bottled or fresh OJ. Straight-up yellow. Well, it wouldn't be that weird if you were right because we name fruit juices after the fruit, not the juice color, but I’ve never seen orange juice that wasn't distinctly on the orange side of yellow, even if its more yellow than orange, including fresh and bottl…

You're just proving my point, of how people insist it's still somehow orange. Sure, almost nothing is perfectly a 60° hue of yellow. But the color orange is all the way at 30°. And if you look at the HSL values of the juice in product photos like the following, you'll get hue values of around 52°: https://www.amazon.com/Tropicana-Orange-Juice-No-Pulp/dp/B07... https://www.amazon.com/Simply-Orange-Pulp-Juice-Drink/dp/…

> And if you look at the HSL values of the juice in product photos like the following, you'll get hue values of around 52°:

So, Just clicking around your first OJ example and checking lots and lots of pixels, in all the areas of the juice, the juice pixels seem to be mostly around 38-42, with a low of about 32 and a high of about 50.

So, as I said, closer to orange (30) than yellow (60), though also definitely in between.

> For comparison, here's the first result for "banana" in Google Images:

> It's 48°, even closer to orange than orange juice.

Most of the brightly illuminated top seems to be in the 48-52 range, the indirectly-lit side is mostly in the mid 40s, though there are some pixels right along the bottom edge that are also brightly lit (from the reflection from the white surface of the light source above) that hit around 60.

Its not more orange than the juice, for sure.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#249

Post by wlonkly »

jamseason wrote: post #196
lewispollard wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it doesn’t actually matter what convention they pick, so long as everyone agrees on it and sticks to it. That would be a good point, if that actually happened, but Japanese traffic lights have a mixture of green for go and blue for go (with most of them being green).

The Japanese specification for the color of traffic lights is certainly written in Japanese. If the specification says the light should have color "ao", then either blue or green or something in between that matches it is OK. That the color region that word encompasses doesn't match that of the English words "green" doesn't really matter, and is not particularly mysterious.

The article talks about the specification and it's more... specific than that:

> “In 1973, the government mandated through a cabinet order that traffic lights use the bluest shade of green possible—still technically green, but noticeably blue enough to justifiably continue using the ao nomenclature,” Allan Richarz writes for Atlas Obscura.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#250

Post by skhr0680 »

roer wrote: post #116
skhr0680 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me the location of an actual blue traffic light in Japan?

I went ahead and geoguessr'd one of the images of a "blue" traffic light, and came to the following: https://maps.app.goo.gl/EjYmH34YC19y3fVt9 There is another one to the right as well. They look very blue when turned off, but cyan/green when turned on.

That color is common in incandescent green traffic lights around the world, not only in Japan. The idea was to use a blue-green lens to make a mostly green light when paired with a yellow lightbulb
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