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Strangely enough, people in Japan call the color of the green traffic signal "blue." The interesting reason is rooted in the Japanese language itself, as you.


This is the bizarre reason that traffic lights in Japan are BLUE instead of green

(December 2023) The notion of "green" in modern European languages corresponds to light wavelengths of about 520-570 nm, but many historical and non-European languages make other choices, e.g. using a term for the range of ca. 450-530 nm ("blue/green") and another for ca. 530-590 nm ("green/yellow").


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When you're walking on the streets in Japan, you can see traffic lights everywhere. Normally, Japanese people distinguish each traffic light as follows: ・Red traffic light=for stop ・Yellow traffic light=proceed with caution ・Green traffic light=for go In other countries, the colors are defined as red, yellow and green but here in Japan,


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Christine Bagarino 01 December 2017. When asked about the colors of a traffic light, most English speakers would reply "red, yellow, and green.". But ask someone in Japan and they will tell you "red, yellow, and blue.". While this may sound strange, there is in fact a linguistic reason for it — midori (緑), the word for green in.


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Green window (usually referring to the ticket office at a train station in Japan) 紫 (むらさき)の靴下 (くつした) Murasaki no kutsushita Purple socks. Why do we use の instead of な? For the answer, head to our article on the dilemma of な-adjectives and の-adjectives. Japanese Colors as Adjectives


Why do traffic lights in Japan have blue lights instead of green? Market Research Telecast

So, while it may appear that Japan uses blue traffic lights, the government assures us it's actually just a very blue shade of green —green enough to satisfy international regulations, blue.


According to Japanese Traffic Lights, Bleen Means Go Atlas Obscura

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In Japan, a game of Red Light, Green Light might be more like Red Light, Blue Light. Because of a linguistic quirk of Japanese, some of the country's street lights feature "go".


According to Japanese Traffic Lights, Bleen Means Go Atlas Obscura

青々 と茂る 森 」 ( Fresh and green overgrown forest) is one of them. In English, of course, we say "fresh and green" but literally it is "blue blue" in Japanese. When the traffic lights arrived for the first time in Japan, they used to use "blue" to express the color of the green traffic light, and still they use "blue.


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The color preference of Japanese people has shifted from green to blue, but this is not due to a faulty setup or color fade; there is another factor at play. In the following section, we will go into further details about it. The whole traffic light has everything to do with the Japanese language.


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Like green vegetables are blue, green traffic lights are blue, and even when someone is young or new at something, they are thought to be the color blue, instead of green. Like this sentence: 彼は、まだ青いな。 ( Kare wa mada aoi na ), "He still is immature." 緑 ( midori) wasn't taught to young Japanese students as a separate color until after Word War II!


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December 28, 2021 When you've just started to learn Japanese, you might notice this: the Japanese adjective for blue and green is the same: あおい (or 青い). Even in modern times, the word "aoi" is used to describe objects that are, well, green. For example, the word green light or green apple uses the kanji 青: 青信号 (aoshingou) and 青りんご (aoringo).


According to Japanese Traffic Lights, Bleen Means Go Atlas Obscura

Green LED lights in use at a flounder farm belonging to Towa Suisan Co. Ltd., Oita Prefecture, southern Japan. Oita Prefecture in southern Japan produces the most flounder in the country. Thanks to an innovative new grow-out technique, it might grow even more. That's because a new light source - green LED light - is being deployed there.


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On September 16, 2022, a homemade motion-detecting camera set up by Daichi Fujii near Mount Fuji, Japan, captured green laser light from NASA's ICESat-2 satellite. It's the first time the ICESat-2 team has seen footage of the lidar instrument at work.


Shinjuku neon lights at night, Tokyo. Japan travel, Tokyo city, Tokyo japan

As explained by Allan Richarz for Atlas Obscura , "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". Put simply, the Japanese government assures us that what we see is.

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