There’s a type of card in 花札 (hanafuda, flower cards) called 短冊 (tanzaku, poetry slips). There are three varieties: 赤たん (aka-tan, red tanzaku), 青たん (ao-tan, blue tanzaku), and the plain variety, simply referred to as tanzaku.
Besides the strangeness of the plain tanzaku also being red, the so-called blue tanzaku are hardly what I would call blue. Instead, they’re more purple. For the moment, I brushed it aside, assuming it was about minimizing the amount of inks used for the cards. Maybe blue wasn’t as useful as purple.
But in Japan, I started hearing things in my periphery, like people referring to green traffic lights as 青 (ao, blue). I’m no stranger to people having different opinions about color definitions. Just ask your friends what color a tennis ball is. I could concede that traffic lights are typically bluish-green, but I would never have called them blue.
When I started learning, I was only taught four color words: 赤 (aka, red), 青 (ao, blue), 黒 (kuro, black), and 白 (shiro, white). I remember being put off by this, because …there are more colors than that?
From my American English-speaking perspective, there are black and white for value; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet for hue.
Of course there are many more, but it becomes difficult to reach consensus on what color range each word represents.
But back to Japanese, the four colors I mentioned are the oldest colors in the language. They were once used for a greater gamut, and not just for color.
赤 (aka, red) was used for all warm colors like red, orange, yellow, and brown. 青 (ao, blue) was used all for cool colors like blue, violet, and green. Colors like yellow and green were not considered unique colors. They were encompassed in either red or blue. That means leaves and bamboo are blue!
The part I truly love is how red also meant bright, while black meant dark. White and blue were used for describing clarity. White was clear, whereas blue was vague.
Later, Japanese gained a wider spectrum of words for color:
There are also common loanwords: シアン (shian, cyan), ピンク (pinku, pink), and オレンジ (orenji, orange).
This color chart reflects my understanding of these colors, both in English and in Japanese. They all have ranges, but I think these are the truest representations people would agree on. There aren’t direct correlations between these languages, so there’s some variance between each palette.
But I’m afraid this opened another can of worms. Why do some color words have 色 (iro, color) attached, while others don’t? 赤、青、黒、白 never seem to need it.
English colors don’t always need “color” context either, but colors named after things like orange could use the clarity. The fruit or the color? Interestingly enough, the 橙 in 橙色 (daidai-iro, orange color) also refers to a variety of bitter orange fruit.
黄 (ki, yellow) on its own sounds identical to other things like 木 (ki, tree). So you need 黄色 (ki-iro, yellow color) to be clearer when speaking.
緑 (midori, green) originally meant a new plant bud, but it now is used to refer to the color. As far as 紫 (murasaki, purple), the name comes from the plant used to make purple dyes. Because these words are colloquially used for color, they don’t usually need the 色 suffix.
However, in the context of a sushi restaurant, 紫 can refer to 醤油 (shōyu, soy sauce). But not everyone knows that.
What about other colors? As I said above, it gets tougher to reach a universal understanding on what color range each word represents (even within the same language), but I wanted to find Japanese analogues to the most commonly understood colors beyond the primaries.
To be clear, I didn’t want to find the counterparts to what I think are the most commonly understood English-named colors, but rather the colors that are the most commonly understood in Japanese outside the basic spectrum.
The word ピンク (pinku, pink) exists, and everyone knows it, but 桃色 (momo-iro, peach color) is the common native word for it. Brown is 茶色 (cha-iro, tea color), which makes a lot of sense. A rich blue that is a just a touch cyan is 藍色 (ai-iro, indigo color). This is a little tricky because it doesn’t map to English-defined indigo, which is more violet. But this refers to the resulting color from Japanese indigo dyeing.
The same colors exist anywhere in the world, but I find it endlessly interesting that region and language influence our perception of color by ascribing names to different reference points.