Off Color

Question: Where can a stoplight be blue, a mouse be green, and scallions be both?

Answer: Japan

When the sky is a shade of green and the grass is a shade of blue, you can only be in one place on earth: Japan. For centuries, the word for green (midori) didn’t exist at all, and even today green is still technically considered a variation of blue. How can that be?

While you might think that the basic colors of the spectrum—red, orange, yellow, green, blue/indigo, violet—are immutable, the truth is more complex. Until you have a name for a color on the spectrum, it does not carry the same value or meaning as it will once you do; the language used to describe a thing is what defines its place in culture. In Japan, where there are 220 common colors and more than 500 named colors used in literature, the spectrum is not composed of our seven colors, but nine series of shades—with green only as a subset (yellow/green, green/blue) and no orange series at all.

It wasn’t until the eighth century that green (until then sharing the word ao with blue) came into common usage, though it was still seen as a variant, not a distinct color. In the 20th century, Japanese schoolchildren were taught midori as its own color, mostly as a response to the use of green in the West. But its metaphoric associations remained true to its origins; someone seen as immature or inexperienced in Japan is blue, not green.

Green’s fellow late arrival, orange, is now sometimes a stand-alone color (daidaiiro or orenji), but in the past, it was simply one of the 75 reds (specifically otan, which means earth red-yellow-brown). In that form, it was most known as one of the “forbidden colors” that no commoner could wear. Even now, the Japanese word for orange is more likely to be describing the fruit than the shade.

With so much variety in the language, it would be equally accurate to describe a pumpkin on the vine as orenji and midori (orange and green), beinukon and aikobicha (red turmeric and indigo tea), and even kanzō-iro and tokusa-iro (daylily and horsetail). Unlike beauty, color is not in the eye of the beholder in Japan, but on the lips of the speaker.

10 Fun Japanese Color Facts

• There are four words for cherry blossom, only one of which is pink (the others are gray, tan, and brown).
• Flowers and trees heavily influence color names, with multiple shades each of azalea, persimmon, peony, plum, and ash.
• Some colors are known by their Eastern or Western or origins, including “true” crimson versus “foreign” crimson.
• Unique colors include dead grass, silverware polish, undried wall, and kite.
• The “nowadays” color is hot pink, made popular in the Heian era when it was an ultramodern red only for the fashionable.
• Smells can be colors (such as clove perfume) and so can textures (including rough bean hull).
• Some names contain colors they are not. A thousand years brown is actually green, while white wisteria is purple.
• Even verbs can be colors, including “love ardently” and “peer into jar.”
• The most represented animal is a mouse, which can come in shades like “thin cloud,” “hidden,” and “safflower,” among others.
• There’s even a color name for something that doesn’t exist: shojyo-hi, imaginary animal blood.

Immerse yourself in the nuances of this singular culture on our Japan’s Cultural Treasures adventure.