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Comment by jdshaffer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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