Why Japan Has Blue Traffic Lights Instead of Green

Re:Why Japan Has Blue Traffic Lights Instead of Green by my12parsecs on Monday October 23, 2023 @02:06PM (#37989348)

I don’t know about the green kanji, but the traditional “Jueju” Poem by Chinese poet Du Fu has the line “山青花欲然”, and “青” the Kanji for Blue in Japan means green in this context, as it describes “山” which means mountain.

By the way there’s a variety of kanji that reads “aoi” in modern Japanese. 青い, 蒼い, 碧い are all “aoi”, but we use 青い mainly as blue today.

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Re:Why Japan Has Blue Traffic Lights Instead of Green by eric-hu on Wednesday October 25, 2023 @12:39PM (#38014713)

Oh that’s interesting. Yeah 青 is used in Chinese as another word for green. I don’t know that it has any connotations of blue, but I did grow up in the US, so perhaps there’s nuance to that character I’m unaware of, or the character slightly changed meaning when made a kanji.

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