Do you know more about the history of this color use? It’s surprising to me that midori uses the kanji for green in Chinese if it’s such a recent idea in Japan.
Green (綠) in Chinese also came later. In Old Chinese, 青 was generally used to represent both blue and green colors.
While the word 綠 to mean green has been attested as far back as 1000 BC, the idea that it was a separate color rather than describing a shade of 青 is relatively more recent. Wikipedia[0] indicates that it was adopted in the early 20th century in Chinese (as part of vernacular language reforms) and after WWII in Japanese, though these claims are currently marked with [citation needed]. While both are relatively recent, the usage in Chinese did have a longer period of time to take hold.
I don’t know about the green kanji, but the traditional “Jueju” Poem by Chinese poet Du Fu has the line “山青花欲然”, and “青” the Kanji for Blue in Japan means green in this context, as it describes “山” which means mountain.
By the way there’s a variety of kanji that reads “aoi” in modern Japanese. 青い, 蒼い, 碧い are all “aoi”, but we use 青い mainly as blue today.
Oh that’s interesting. Yeah 青 is used in Chinese as another word for green. I don’t know that it has any connotations of blue, but I did grow up in the US, so perhaps there’s nuance to that character I’m unaware of, or the character slightly changed meaning when made a kanji.
What I was told, when I asked about this, was that "midori" existed as a Japanese word but was not in common usage. That is what Mizutani-san from JAL Academy told me back in 2009 anyway.
While the word 綠 to mean green has been attested as far back as 1000 BC, the idea that it was a separate color rather than describing a shade of 青 is relatively more recent. Wikipedia[0] indicates that it was adopted in the early 20th century in Chinese (as part of vernacular language reforms) and after WWII in Japanese, though these claims are currently marked with [citation needed]. While both are relatively recent, the usage in Chinese did have a longer period of time to take hold.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...