This Is Why Japan Has Blue Visitors Lights As an alternative of Inexperienced

Salaryman/ShutterstockIt’s a lesson most of us study years earlier than we’re sufficiently old to see over the dashboard: Purple means cease, inexperienced means go. Easy sufficient. However what occurs once you stay in a tradition the place inexperienced additionally means blue? (By the best way, for this reason our personal traffic light colors are pink, yellow, and inexperienced.)

That’s once you see issues like this. Drive round Japan lengthy sufficient and also you’ll most likely run into one of many nation’s legendary blue site visitors lights. Elsewhere across the island you’ll discover “go” indicators which are decidedly teal, turquoise, and aqua. “Is that this sign damaged?” you would possibly surprise. “Did some overworked light-monger set up the incorrect bulbs?” The reply, as Atlas Obscura factors out, will not be within the wiring: it’s within the Japanese language.

A whole lot of years in the past, the Japanese language included phrases for less than 4 primary colours: black, white, pink, and blue. Should you needed to explain one thing inexperienced, you’d use the phrase for blue—“ao”—and that system labored properly sufficient till roughly the tip of the primary millennium, when the phrase “midori” (initially that means “sprout”) started exhibiting up in writing to explain what we all know as inexperienced. Even then, midori was thought of a shade of ao. As you may think about, this sudden switch-over had lasting results in Japan. Some of the widespread types of Japanese wordplay is numeric substitution—writing numerals rather than phrases or letters with the identical phonetic worth. Discover out why the quantity 39 means thank you in Japan.

In the present day you’ll nonetheless see inexperienced issues dubiously labeled blue. A fruit vendor would possibly promote you an ao-ringo (blue apple) solely to disappoint you that it’s truly inexperienced. Likewise, inexperienced bamboos are referred to as aodake (“blue bamboos”) and an inexperienced worker who might be described as “inexperienced” in America could also be referred to as aonisai, that means a “blue two-year-old.” And that brings us to site visitors lights.

Initially, Japan’s site visitors lights have been inexperienced as inexperienced could be. Regardless of this, the nation’s official site visitors paperwork nonetheless referred to inexperienced site visitors lights as ao fairly than midori. Whereas worldwide site visitors regulation decrees all “go” indicators have to be represented by inexperienced lights, Japanese linguists objected to their authorities’s choice to proceed utilizing the phrase ao to explain what was clearly midori. The federal government determined to compromise. “In 1973, the federal government mandated by way of a cupboard order that site visitors lights use the bluest shade of inexperienced potential—nonetheless technically inexperienced, however noticeably blue sufficient to justifiably proceed utilizing the ao nomenclature,” Allan Richarz writes for Atlas Obscura.

So, whereas it could seem that Japan makes use of blue site visitors lights, the federal government assures us it’s truly simply a really blue shade of inexperienced—inexperienced sufficient to fulfill worldwide laws, blue sufficient to nonetheless be referred to as ao. Don’t ever say forms by no means solved something. (And be sure you brush up on these driving etiquette rules while you’re at it.)