What colors do you see in this traffic light? Red, Yellow, and . . . .?
In English, we would say the colors of a traffic light are red, yellow and green. However, Japanese describe the three colors as red, yellow, and blue. But why?
While the answer might not be what you were expecting, the story behind it offers a fascinating look at the nature of language.
Search online and most places will tell you that the reason that Japanese say a traffic light is blue has to do with Japanese not originally having a color word for green. This is because, according to linguistics, green as a color word distinct from blue is seen as a late development in many languages.
In Japanese for example, the word for green, midori (緑), was not used for color originally but to describe young plants. Thus, the story goes that when traffic lights were introduced to Japan, Japanese people looked at it and said that it was blue and the name stuck. However there is more to it.
Traffic lights came to Japan in around 1930, well past the time that Japanese, and their language, started making distinctions between all sorts of colors. In fact, when the first traffic lights were introduced in Japan they were legally called green lights (midori-iro shingō 緑色信号) not blue lights (ao-shingō 青信号). So people knew exactly what color they were and what to call them.
So again why blue?
The Lights Were/Are Blue
First, while being officially called green, many of the first traffic lights looked very blue. Here are some pictures from the Kyoto Prefectural Government offices, where I occasionally work.
The main chamber and offices were originally built starting in 1904 (with additional buildings built later) and thus have some early examples of traffic lights installed in the city. To this day they are still there and you can see that they look more blue than green.
The Media Called the Lights ‘Blue’
To add to the confusion, newspapers at the time preferred to call the lights ‘blue’ regardless of how they looked as it fit the classic primary color scheme.
Imported from China, the traditional Japanese color wheel had five colors
Ao-iro 青色 — blue
Ki-iro 黄色 — yellow
Aka 赤 — red
Kuro 黒 — black
Shiro 白 — white
Notice how there is red, yellow, and blue. Educated artistic writers, like those who wrote for newspapers in the 1930s, saw a perfect correlation between the classic primary colors and the three colors on traffic lights. In other words, they called it blue because it was the color that you thought of in the same breadth as red and yellow (and was not too far from the truth).
So the Japanese public got told different things from many different directions. Some lights looked green, some looked blue, the newspapers said blue, the government said green, some of their friends and family said one color, some said another.
So why do Japanese call traffic lights blue? Linguistic chance.
Linguistic Chance
None of the above alone was enough to cause the Japanese to call traffic lights are “blue,” but put them all together and you have the story of the round about way it all came about.
‘Blue’ or ‘green’ completed in a kind of sociolinguistic experiment, the kind that linguists dream of. Introduce a new thing into a language population along with two words for it and see which one wins.
In the end, the Japanese people choose, intentionally or not, to call traffic lights ‘blue’. One might say that this shows that newspapers and tradition hold more linguistic sway than do governments and science. But I think it shows how language speakers shape the way their language is used. Even if there is a word for something, like green, it does not mean that a linguistic community will decide that is the word they are going to use.
When dealing with a group of people, in this case language speakers, there is always room for the unpredictable to happen; leaving us with interesting stories and blue traffic lights.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed it and would like to support me, there are several ways, all of which I would greatly appreciate.
Engage with this article by commenting and sharing it others who might be enjoy it. Its Free!
Already Subscriber? Gift a subscription to someone you think would like this article
Fascinating. Thank you.