Before we’re old enough to even see over the dashboard, we learn that green means go and red means stop. This internationally recognized traffic light color system is standard in most of the world.

The reason behind the unusual traffic light color is closely associated with language.In Classical Japanese, the word to denote blue (ao) is interchangeable with the term to denote green and cyan ...

It turns out that much like the human population in Japan, the traffic light population is aging at an alarming rate. According to the National Police Agency (NPA), the lifespan of a traffic light is ...

Japanese traffic lights are blue instead of the green Americans know, but the reasoning involves some complex linguistic background and history.