Japanese traffic lights are different from our usual red, yellow and green colors. It uses blue instead of green. Exotic semaphores have already become a hallmark of Japan and this unusual phenomenon attracts the attention of foreigners who come here.

The origin of such a “mysterious” combination of colors goes down in history and lies in national linguistic traditions and features. Initially, the Japanese language did not contain a separate word for the color green. Cold shades such as blue, cyan, emerald, green and other similar shades were denoted by only one word "aoi".

Later, a new word "midori" appeared in Japanese - the designation of green. However, the Japanese traditionally continued to use the word "aoi" for both blue and green. They did not retrain people for use in the vocabulary "midori" for green. And when the first traffic lights appeared in Japan in the 1930s, the government of the country decided not to change the traditional language order and not to switch to a new word so as not to cause confusion among the population.

This is how traffic lights with a blue signal instead of green appeared and have been a national feature of Japan for half a century (since 1973).

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