Names for colors don't work the same way in different languages.
Let's take the Japanese word 青(Ao) as an example. It translates as the color blue. It can also be translated as the color green. Nowadays it usually means blue and for green they use the word 緑(Midori), but this does mean that previously the language (and thus the people) viewed blue and green as just different shades of the same color. In fact, blue and green being seen as different shades of the same color is a very common trope, thus creating the term "grue" in English.
Let's have another example of the opposite effect. In English, the rainbow has 2 blue shades, typically we just refer to them as blue and light-blue. But in Russian, light-blue actually has its own word, Голубой. If you think it's weird, I'd like to remind you that pink is just bright-red.

In fact, color name development is actually a pretty interesting topic in linguistics. If you observe the evolution of many languages over long periods of time, you can somewhat see a pattern in which colors get their names first. 
Of course, there are a couple theories, but the pattern most likely goes like this:
Black and White (Or, perhaps, light and dark shades) -> Red -> Yellow and Green -> Blue -> Brown -> All the rest
This progression of color names is also the reason why in the "Iliad" you can find the term "wine-dark sea". The sea wasn't red back then, they just had no distinction between blue and red.