Edging Toward Japan: The Japanese discovery of the colour blue - The Mainichi

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Hokusai, "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" from "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" (1830-32. Public Domain)

By Damian Flanagan

I seem to recall some years ago reading a short story by Haruki Murakami called "Losing Blue" ("Ao ga Kieru"). If memory serves, this describes a man waking up one morning to discover, to his sadness, that the colour blue has completely vanished from the world, though nobody else apart from him appears to have noticed. The story seemed to me like quite a clever allegory for so many things that slip away from us in the modern world without anyone apparently realising.

However, it's not so much losing the colour blue, but discovering it in the first place that has been on my mind recently. In July last year I was at an exhibition at the auction house Sotheby's in London and got to admire up close some original prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige. We are so used to images of Hokusai's famous depiction of "The Great Wave" or his blue-infused vision of Mount Fuji that we tend to think of the "blueyness" of this art as quintessentially Japanese.

Yet a particular set of historical circumstances, and international influences, helped to produce this iconic art. A clampdown by the Japanese government on the depictions of the lusty pleasure quarters so beloved by ukiyo-e artists of the 18th century like Harunobu and Utamaro forced 19th century artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige to devote their attention to landscape portraiture instead. And crucially, they were suddenly given access to a vibrantly new colour pigment, Prussian Blue, produced in the factories of Northern Europe -- a world until then entirely closed to them. The combination of Japanese artists having their eyes turned towards previously ignored subjects and having a newly imported colour in which to paint them helped produce such iconic, visually arresting artworks.

Hokusai, from "The Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" (1830-32. Public domain)

But then, the story of Japan's interaction with the colour blue has always been a rather peculiar one. One of the first things any student of elementary Japanese learns is that the word for "blue" in Japanese is "ao," but that this word actually means "blue or green." I must confess that, for long decades, I did not understand this. How could a word mean both blue and green? This seemed to me equivalent to having a word that meant "square or circular" i.e. very confusing about the meaning it is trying to convey.

What makes this even more baffling is that the Japanese language also has a perfectly clear and common word for "green" ("midori"). So why on Earth would you not just have a word for "blue" ("ao") without bringing in the possibility that what you are talking about is not blue at all, but green?

In terms of everyday usage, "ao" does indeed mean for most of the time "blue," but just when you think you can ignore the confusing "...or green" part of its meaning, it turns out that "green" things, which could be called "midori," are also called "ao." The most common example of this is the green of a traffic light, which is "ao," not "midori."

As if all this isn't confusing enough, the expression for "deep green," the type of green you see when walking through summer woods for example, is "ao ao shita midori," which literally means "blue blue green." Why can't Japan keep "blue" and "green" apart?

Hiroshige, from "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" (1856-59. Public domain)

To answer that question, you have to think about the way we conceptualize colour in the world. We tend to think it natural to clearly differentiate the colours in a light spectrum as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet etc. But there is no particular reason why a specific band of the light spectrum is intrinsically obvious to us as a definitive colour. Both wider and narrower bands of colour on the light spectrum might appear to us as recognizable colours depending on our associations with them.

Most colours are obvious to us by connection with objects in the real world: blood is red; the sun is yellow. Indeed, many colours in Japanese are denoted by connection to real world objects. Grey is "rat-coloured" (nezumi-iro) or "ash-coloured" (hai-iro), while brown is "tea-coloured" (cha-iro).

The problem with blue is that there are not many solid objects in the world that we can actually associate with blue. The two things people immediately think when you mention "blue" are the sky and the sea, but both of these are things you cannot grasp and whose colour are often a will-o-the-wisp of illusion. Pour some of that "blue" sea into a glass and it...