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These days, orange is the new black, pink is the old floyd, and white is having a major
PR crisis.
But in Japan, green is the new blue… and, also the old blue.
Well, really green is just the blue.
Let me explain.
You see, the Japanese word for blue is ao.
This blue car is called an aoi kuruma, the Blue Man Group is called aoi mangurupu, and
if you were describing the color of the hottest muppet, you’d say he’s aoi.
But here’s where things get weird: what we’d call a granny smith apple, or green
apple, or bad-tasting apple, they in Japan call an ao ringo: a blue apple.
And these, what we’d call green vegetables, or “my food’s food,” they in Japan call
ao yasai: blue vegetables.
So, why do Japanese people see green differently?
Well, it has nothing to do with eyeballs, eyes, or balls.
Instead, Japanese folk have a tendency to call green things blue because of the different
ways that languages describe the very same colors we all see every day—well, except
for our colorblind friends, this episode could get a little dull for you if you can’t differentiate
blue and green, but I’ve kept this from you just about long enough for YouTube to
count this as a view.
Okay, so the ability for human’s eyes to see and differentiate colors doesn’t differ
by culture—pretty much across the board human eyes can distinguish around 7 million
different color variations.
But, no language has yet to come up with a name for all 7 million—I mean come on, English
uses the same word for traffic issues, playing music, and melty fruit, you think we’re
gonna have different words for this color and this color?
Now, here in the US, we’ve essentially leaned on ROYGBIV to organize our basic color names
for quite a while, ever since we lost the great American patriot Royland Grindlewald
Biverston Jr. in the Rainbow Wars—plus, of course, black and white, which we kept
in good practice through old movies and racism.
These basic colors—red, orange, yogurt, green, blue, indiegogo, viola, black, and
white—have given us, at least in our minds, a pretty standard set of distinct colors to
describe the world around us.
But Japan never had a war hero like ROYGBIV, and despite more than one war trying to change
this, Japanese is not English, so the language developed its own unique method of describing
colors.
Way back in the day, when the Japanese language was just a tyke, it decided that, so as not
to get too far ahead of itself, the language would begin with only four color words: white,
black, red, and blue.
With only four words to describe the 7 million different visible shades of color, these four
options had to do some heavy lifting.
With no other words to do the trick, ao or blue, served as a catchall for all shades
from green, through blue, and to indigo.
So, in function, blue was also green because blue was the best option to describe what
we’d call green.
In addition to making Power Ranger meetings very confusing, this system eventually became
untenable, and the Japanese language added a word for green, which you can see in the
comments section, courtesy of people who decided to well actually me before they made it to
this part of the video.
This word for green, midori, has actually been around for quite a while.
That’s because as Japanese got older, it got more complicated, and with more words
came more colors… a lot more colors, five hundred more colors in fact—I mean just
look at this Wikipedia list of traditional Japanese colors.
These new colors didn’t replace the four OGs though, but rather served as more accurate
names for shades derived from the founding four.
Thus, while Japanese technically had a new term in their vocab quiver to more precisely
identify something as green and not blue, speakers still referred to green things as
ao well into the 1900s until the US war-crimed them into thinking about colors like a ‘Murican.
The transition began the same way all American imperialist propaganda does: with crayons,
which first came to Japan in 1917.
Add in a cheeky American occupation after World War II, and Japan started to get on
board with the western style of color thinking—that it’d be handy to just have a handful of
distinct color names, ROYGBIV-style, rather than hundreds of slightly different shades
deriving from the fab four.
Because of this, demarcation between blue and green has become more commonplace, but
still, there’s a long-lasting legacy of titles of green things that are identified
as blue.
Whether it be calling inexperienced people blue horns, green apples blue apples, well-watered
front yards blue lawns, using ao-ao not as a catcall but a description of lush greenery,
or the fact that despite a nearly global standard of green for go on traffic lights, Japan’s
green lights are more blue M&M than green M&M, if you follow my metaphor.
But having different methods of interpreting color and describing it through language isn’t
unique to Japanese or English.
If you were to head to the Ivory Coast and offer the riddle, “what’s black, white,
and red all over?” to some Wobé speakers, they’d look at you weird for a second and
then say “everything,” and you’d be left friendless because you didn’t recognize
that this culture only has three basic color names in their language, and because everybody
hates guys who ask riddles.
Just ask Batman, or anybody who watched my trivia show.
In Russia, on the other hand, you, as an English speaker, would be thought of as a color simpleton,
because while we just have one “blue” that covers everything from sky blue to dark
blue, they have two separate blues in their lexicon of primary colors.
So, in conclusion, in Japan green is blue, in the Ivory Coast blue is red, in Russia
some blue isn’t blue at all, and in the US blue is just blue.
But these color-name quirks are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the important
differences in how languages work, and if you want to learn more then follow this link
to start your thirty day free trial at Audible where you can explore countless audiobooks
and entire courses on linguistics.
Or, if you’re looking for more on green, I suggest checking out Matthew McConoughey’s
new audiobook, Greenlights, which won’t actually teach you much about the color green,
but will, through engaging story-telling and McConoughey’s silky narration, provide insights
on how to live a full, engaged, and inspired life—and the ratings say it’s pretty good.
You can listen to Greenlights or absolutely any audiobook for free when you sign up for
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