The Japanese traffic light blues: Stop on red, go on what? | Hacker News Reader

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

japantimes.co.jp

65 pointslelf69 comments

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.

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.

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.

maaark probably referred to that the sun actually is white, but may appears with different colors if you see it through a filter (atmosphere): http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/GreenSun.htm...

It's white by some definitions and not by others, there's no single objective truth to the matter. But none of this has any relevance to the post originally being replied to.

No. It's mostly green :P

Recently been enjoying a couple of Japanese HD-quality train webcams, that have some auto and pedestrian traffic signals visible in the shots. They look green to me.

Obligatory aside: It's not easy being green.

The same character is used in Chinese where it also refers to bluish-green, tending closer to green than blue:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9D%92

There is also a character for a much deeper blue:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%97%8D

True, see the Pokémon case with the original Green edition and then the Blue one.

In this case, no - Pokémon Red+Green were the two games released together in Japan, and Blue was a special edition released later.

When it came out in the US, they based Red and Blue on the updated code+artwork from Blue, but with the catchable Pokémon split that was there between JP Red/Green (e.g. Electabuzz/Magmar were exclusive to JP Red/Green and US Red/Blue, respectively). (This is also why on, say, Bulbapedia the sprite lists for Gen 1 list "Red/Blue", "Yellow", and "Red/Green" as different entries.)

(I _think_ it was just that they preferred the red/blue contrast? I'm not sure I ever heard a definitive answer why, other than perhaps the fact that they mashed up the Blue and Green version.)

The article doesn't really make this clear, but in modern Japanese 青 as a color just means blue, unambiguously. There are a lot of set phrases where it refers to green, but these have really only survived in cases where the color of the thing is obvious from context. When Japanese 青 is used to specify an unknown color it's just blue.

In Japanese, the blue sky is 青い空 (aoi sora). No green in it.

There's been a shift in Chinese with the character tending to mean blue in classical Chinese and green in modern Chinese, though some expressions retain the 'blue' meaning.

Japanese tends to use Chinese characters based on classical meaning.

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.

That's because they're a mix of yellow and orange. They're called amber across Europe too, officially anyway. :)

Red, amber, green in the UK. Always amber and never yellow.

Conversely, UK railway signals are always yellow and never amber.

Not where I'm from, it's simply yellow.

Amber, the color of traffic lights, waves of grain and... pretty much nothing else.

Reminds me of (grammatical) petrels:

https://www.kith.org/words/lists/petrels-list/

It's as if when modifiers and nouns sense they are dying in a language, they clutch on to one another for support, and eventually become like a single unit.

I think there's also a naturally-occurring substance that's amber-colored, but I can't remember what it's called.

I've never heard "amber" used as a modifier for "amber."

"Quick, bring me the amber amber, Amber!"

I didn't write the comment very clearly, but the petrels were a hint I was talking about language and usage, not simply objects in that part of the spectrum.

Ale is a notable omission, but the candidates dwindle.

Medications are usually dispensed in amber-colored vials and bottles (my Dad used to work for a company that manufactured them).

Also, amber used to be a common color (though maybe not as common as green, from my experience) for monochrome terminals and computer screens.

I still see the word used often enough that I don't think it should be declared dead quite yet...

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.

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.

No. The official position (as quoted by someone who actually asked the Highways Agency) is that the ability to actually tell red from green is not necessary for traffic lights. The sequence of lights and the positions of the lights is adequate.

* http://andrewhenley.co.uk/2012/02/colour-blindness-and-red-t...

The statutory instrument that governs traffic lights does not actually state anything more specific than "green", so claims that "our green has a bit of blue added" are not borne out by the regulations that actually apply, which do not mandate any such thing. (The regulations are specific about sizes in mm and timings in s, with allowed margins of variability, so the lack of specifics as to colour is not simply because the regulations are generally vague.) Since it isn't a mandate in the first place, explanations that this is mandated for the benefit of the colour blind are ill-founded.

* http://legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2016/362/schedule/14/part/2/m...

The idea that colour changes are done to help the colour blind ironically comes to newspapers and Internet discussions from outwith the U.K., from research and proposals in countries where there are multiple allowed arrangements and position alone is not an unambiguous determiner.

An easier explanation for more blue in traffic lights as they switch to LEDs is that blue LEDs are just boringly cheaper.

What? Blue LEDs used to be the most expensive. Say $1 per in bulk vs 2 cents for red or green. Has that gone full circle?

That is my understanding. Blue LEDs were last to be developed so they carried their R&D costs until more recently, but between efficiency breakthroughs and mass production improvements have passed through to being the cheapest to buy, especially in terms of lumens per dollar in places where you really need brightness such as traffic lights or overhead LED lighting in homes.

There is less blue in trafic lights as they switch to LEDs because green LEDs are i) dirt cheap and ii) don't require the coloured filter that the older halogen heads did.

Except SIRA make the filters added to halogen traffic lights, and they made the green filters a green blue specifically to help people with colourblindness see the difference.

This is specified in BS EN 12368.

All your government link says is "we don't want to admit there's a problem because then we'd have to pay for it".

Please note that I didn't claim "traffic light manufacturers are forced by UK law to add blue".

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.

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).

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.

In short: Historically, blue and green were the same word. Green is now a separate word, but some green things are called "blue" including green traffic lights. Other "blue" things include apples and vegetables.

yup, exactly this - Chinese is the same - but which characters they each finally chose are somewhat different

I think you are missing the major point of interest here:

Traffic lights were introduced after the separation of color words and were originally called green light.

That doesn't seem to be what the article says at all:

> this was most likely due to the fact that red, blue and yellow (赤青黄) are regarded as the three primary colors in Japanese painting. Hence the “blue” traffic lights.

They're also regarded as the three primary colors in US painting - I recall having it explained to me when very young with two color wheels as combining paint versus combining light.

English to the rescue. Japanese has the word ブルー ("buruu", blue) from English. That word only means blue, and not green. If you want to be specific that something is blue, excluding green, just use "buruu".

Outside of set phrases, 青 also only means blue.

It also happens in Korean. The green light is 파란불, literally "blue light". (Thankfully, traffic lights are actually green around here.) In modern usage, 파란 means "blue" most of the time, but its variant 푸른 continues to mean "grue". The sky is grue, and so is the pasture.

I don't think Korean even has a native word for "green". The most common word for "green" in modern usage is 녹색, which comes from the Chinese characters 綠色 and feels more like a technical term than a native Korean word when placed in a sentence.

/me lives in the Tokyo area, ethnically Japanese but grew up in the USA.

I still call these "grue" lights "midori" (green), confusing people around me.

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.

Another interesting things about Japan's traffic lights: as far as I can tell, they don't detect whether cars are waiting for the light. Last time I visited, I was waiting for ages for the light to change along with other cars, and light wouldn't change early even if there were no cars going through the intersection.

That's just fair - pedestrians aren't detected either

If one set of people are waiting unnecessarily, we should make another set do so also?

If the pedestrian was about to get green (or blue) but a car was detected and the pedestrian was forced to wait then that's not fair is it?

We already prioritize cars enough, pedestrians usually have to press a button to trigger the crossing so they're always waiting but cars don't get punished for getting to the lights a second after the sequence starts.

Excactly.

Close to where I live there are a couple of funny examples:

In one place the lights are red by default for everyone. Cars are detected from 100m or so away, so they barely need to slow down. Pedestrians need to press a button and usually wait for a while.

At another crossing the lights are green by default for the bigger road. A sideroad has car-detection that is ofter rather quick. Pedestrians and cyclists need to press a button and usually wait for a long time.

Just because you don't sit in a car it's ok to wait that much longer.

A random pedestrian is just as likely to be helped by a light change as hurt by it. You provide an excellent example of motivated zero-sum reasoning though!

Pedestrians have a button to press to let the signal know they exist. Until we invent car-hands, that seems equivalent enough.

Not strictly true, a number of different traffic systems detect cars using detection methods such as cameras and radar/microwave.

In Japan there is sometimes a button for cyclists/motorcycles to push to get the lughts to change. I assumed this was because there is a sensor in the road to detect cars, but now I'm not so sure.

In a number of those systems, the buttons are a placebo that are wired to nothing. [1] [2]

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/us/placebo-buttons-elevat...

[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/27/nyregion/for-exercise-in-...

Actually in Japan pedestrian sensors have been deployed. https://www.kyosan.co.jp/product/traffic04.html

I've been living in Japan for about 25 years and a lot of Westerners get confused over this.

Concepts like "blue" and "green" are abstract. The word 青 covers a different part of the spectrum than the word "blue".

People get hung up on "what's the Japanese word that means X", but often there is no word that means X. There is no distinct concept for X in Japanese. And this goes far beyond color names.

European languages largely share a common cultural heritage and concepts tend to map between them relatively easily, but many cultures aren't like that.

The Japanese stoplight colors are just the tip of a very, very deep iceberg.

Take a picture of a traffic light, color-picker out the green and print it solid on a large sheet. Ask Japanese friends what color it is, they'll all say green.

(Disclaimer: I once did this. Also, I might need some hobbies)

OT, but not much, if you google for "petrol blue" you will find a lot of colours that many people would call "green" and if you look for "petrol green" you will find a lot of colours that many people would call "blue".

We used to have a car of the exact shade of green (or blue) that people called alternatively green or blue, often only because of different lighting.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/petrol_blue

Many languages don't distinguish between blue and green. Other western colors are also up for grabs: orange is named after the fruit, and didn't used to exist either.

Apropos traffic lights, as a European driving in Japan I was amazed at the ability to go straight on a red light (with a green straight arrow).

I read somewhere that the original green light was blue but green was easier to see at dawn or at dusk or at you or something so they switched

The number of myths surrounding this phenomenon are quite numourous.

* The character for blue is simpler than the character for green, so it's easier for young school children to read safety text, if we call it blue (heard this from several people)

* "It IS blue" (not uncommon either)

* It used to be blue (apparently contradictred by TFA)

I read somewhere (and a Google search brings up many articles that supports this) that among societies and languages that makes fewer distinctions between colors than the global educated society, blue and green are among the most frequent to remain undistinguished.

My dad also doesn't really distinguish between blue and green. It's mostly green to him. And he grew up in Italy...

He might just be slightly colorblind. Partial colorblindness is quite common.

"backwards parking" :)

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