Ethnography: 青(あお)い aoi

Subtitle: あか、あお、といろい*

 I really should save this for the third book blog… でも… [Having spent far too much time on this post, I am making this my third book blog - 3.5 if you count musings on red too…. I had intended to go back and do the other cute cat book, because cute cats… Some other time, apparently. ]

About the first word that you learn in Japan when you learn hiragana as a foreign learner is the word あお. There’s a really good reason for that - you can make the whole word out of vowels and in any dictionary order learning of the hiragana, you will do those first. They’re also the sounds that underpin all of the other hiragana, so it makes sense. 

And whichever program you are using will tell you that あお (ao - sounds like ow!! in English) means blue  and you will tuck this information away and go merrily along your way, and learn other words made with vowels like いえ and いいえ, and hopefully someone will tell you about long vowels so that you can say them right, or at least about body language, so that if you accidentally say “house” to someone when you meant “no”, no harm will be done…

And you’ll learn the next column of hiragana, the k-vowel combination column and learn あか and learn that this is red. A while later and you will learn しろ, white  At about this point, most hiragana programs stop telling you colours and you actually have to look up other colours to find out that くろ is black, most are happy to teach you よる (night) as an example of よ and leave you be, leaving you half a go set short of a full game… You can find pages of words linked by topics and get a whole swathe of colours in Japanese, including words such as みどり for green, and you note that it is the same word as the virulently green melon liqueur, Midori, in English - it’s so green that it reminds me of a line from the Narnia Chronicles - “as green as poison”.  And everything seems simple… 

But when I started to learn kanji, some of the colours are simple**, like 白, and some are complicated to draw like あお - 青 and they become much more complicated when the translation for that kanji says “bluey green”.  “But wait”, you say  “This was the first Japanese word I learned and it was blue!  How or why is it blue-green now?”  And then dear readers, you find out that Duolingo lied to you… Let’s all take the time to put on our shocked faces… 😧

So, being a busy person, you just quietly stuff this contradiction in the back of your head and blue carries on being blue, you can tap through your hiragana practice on Duolingo at top speed, gravity is still down, the sun still rises in the east***, and all is right with the world.

…

Until… for your second ethnography reading assignment, you can pick your own book from level 0 (& their level 0 is an appropriate level 0 unlike the stupidly advanced stories Duolingo gives you).  So you click on maybe 16 or so books to open them because their covers look interesting - a word you have seen in passing, and wondered about (まで), or cute cats (yes, I ended up doing the cute cat one), or ones with pretty pictures on the front in red or blue…which turn out to be about the colour red and the colour blue, respectively. The colour blue book is at https://tadoku.org/japanese/book/4155/#bd-look-inside.

The colour red one has nothing surprising in it, as I already knew the red threads of fate concept - apparently you can learn things about the culture from anime, especially if you are curious and google on things afterwards.  But as you are going through the colour blue book, you find a couple of pages of very, very, green items… Green apples and green vegetables, like peppers#, and spinach^ and green onions…and a green “can cross” light and a page of many blue things, and many green things, which tells us that everything is あおい-みんな青いです。

And you think “yeah, no, I’m going back to the cute cats one…” and you write your book report on that instead.

But after class tonight, when you have been setting the world to rights with another student and 先生stops in before leaving to ask if you have any questions, you ask what was up with the blue book…and 先生 was kind enough to explain.

I posted in previous blogs about the effect that language has on thought and whether you can have a thought if the word for it doesn’t exist and in Japan, culturally, blue is green is blue so can you even see it as green, even if you learn all the names for shades of blue and green in another language?  Or will it always be blue?  And does it make any difference, because the I see in anime, or on kimono printed patterns, certainly uses many shades of each. So is it even a problem, but just a case of “a rose by another name would smell as sweet”?

The part of me that liked painting with pigments and paints as a child and knew that green was yellow+blue, the playing with pigments part says “I can see that.  Green is just blue with a bit of yellow in it.  Sometimes more, sometimes less, yellowy green or bluey green, still green”.

That part was rather appalled when I met physics and biology, and colours being made out of light (& they make different colours…) and that all the colours that humans can see can be made out of red, blue and green light, because of the sensitivities of the cones in our eyes to light wavelengths.  That physics and biology side of me says “but that’s 2/3 of all colour vision source being treated as the same colour?!?  How can anyone in Japan understand colour tv and pixel colour coding with RGB values, how does that even make sense to them?  How do you teach about colour vision when you might say that we have three types of cones in our eyes, red, blue and blue…  “

When I asked 先生 about having seen a word for green in Japanese, midori, she did tell us that the virulently green colour you get with midori is the only green culturally seen as green and not as a shade of blue/bluey-green   Perhaps that is how things get labeled for rgb values, and colour vision descriptions  

This led me to share a time when I was doing teacher training, and we were looking at the colours of transition metal compounds in solution, and the process was looking at different compounds having different properties even though one thing is the same.  Copper sulphate has gorgeous blue crystals, and copper chloride is a paler bluey green, although it can be very green, and iron sulphate is a very pale green  

One of the students couldn’t tell the difference between them and I asked him to look at the tap handle, which had a green outside, and a blue center to indicate cold water  he couldn’t tell the difference, except that one looked darker than the other  

Blue-green colour blindness is relatively rare, red-green, is the most common, but I had to tell his regular teacher about it so his parents could be informed and an eye test scheduled  and if he ever wanted to be a commercial pilot or fly in the air force, that was probably out of reach now… I wonder how issues like that get detected in Japan, given the cultural approach to colour and blue/green…?

先生 also shared with us that although we tend to see the sun as yellow, and that’s the colour you would make it if you drew a picture without thinking about it , in Japan, it’s red##. 

This coordinates with the colour on the flag, but the sun isn’t just perceived as red when it is rising or setting  it is always あか  - the question becomes then, is it always red, or seen as red, as we would understand it, or is it multiple colours, but any colour the sun can be/is, but just gets called red because red is sun-coloured, and by definition, the sun has to be sun-coloured …?

I was doing some kanji practice after class and symbol/word for bright came up, which is NLPT4, but that’s another story.###

So the first word in that section is あかるい, which means bright  As you can see from the image right above this paragraph, complete with its (slightly badly drawn) kanji…

I had always liked the kanji, because it has the kanji for both the sun and the moon in it and of course, that is going to be bright!

And I had always taken the word as a whole, and nothing thought about it, nor really noticed the fact that part of the word was in blue and the rest was in white.  Whether it was the conversation tonight with 先生 and one other student, or the time spent going through the vocabulary list and trying to work out the colour coding for red/blue/purple/green/mustardy brown/black for the various parts of speech (I think I have it cracked), but either way, my eyes instantly locked onto that blue word - あか  Red. Before I would have thought that it was it’s nothing, a coincidence. Now, I’m thinking “Sun coloured = bright = red”.  I’ve always liked that the kanji for tomorrow, あした、明日, has the kanji for bright and the kanji for day in there - makes it easy to remember as “tomorrow will be a bright new day”.  I like that 明後日、明後日、is tomorrow but with a pause or a delay in it.  It’s perfect.  But now I have an extra layer of meaning and things to think about with the base piece, あかるい. I know the kanji are different for あか and あかるい, even the outdated/other forms of the kanji for red, but I can’t help think they are related.  When you close your eyes against a bright light, you see red…

I haven’t changed much since I last blogged about one of these books, but it has only been a couple of days… and I didn’t have any linguistic difficulty reading it, I could translate all the words, just cultural difficulty.  I bounced hard off the “green is blue” concept, even though I had wondered about the bluey green description of the kanji. The only time we tend to have issues identifying blue and green in English, barring colour blindness, is when it is a colour like teal or turquoise, and they are both shades that are about 50/50 split between blue and green, just darker and brighter shades of them, so one person might call it teal green and another teal blue, and turquoise green/turquoise blue.  Green being blue made no sense to me whatsoever, so despite the pictures and knowing the words, I couldn’t grasp it - a little like when I can put all the katakana together, sound by sound, but still cannot work out what the original loan word is - can’t make that final leap despite having all the pieces of the puzzle.

*Apologies for the [sub]title, even in Japanese I have problems abandoning the Oxford comma… ;)

** at least to draw. The etymology of the symbol is a little more muddy, despite it looking to my eyes exactly like glyphs they have which it states is a bowl of rice or a bowl of rice on a stand. And rice is a benchmark for white, even in western culture, we have a saying about someone was “all over them like white on rice”… but apparently, this glyph etymology is confusing. ちょっと…

*** more on that later…

# I know peppers can be red or orange or yellow as well, but these were green. 

^ the spinach was amazing, because, instead of being loose and higgledypiggledy, and taking a ton of space, it was all oriented the same way and pressed tightly and bound together in a bunch.

## I did tell you in *** that there would be more on that later… The sun does still rise in the East, but what colour is it?

### thankfully, a short one for once. The iPhone app I was using to learn the kanji called, very originally, Kanji, has them broken out into NLPT levels. And I was curious about what was in the level 4 list, and I opened that section. I tapped through a couple, instead of just looking at the chart. Turned out, that added them permanently to my symbol rotation, rather than only practicing those if I open the NLPT4 level section…