"Momiji" means Japanese Maple trees which will turn to beautiful red in fall, but the word also can mean just "Colored Leaves". It is confusing since Chinese characters used for writing, are ideographic where each character can have multiple meanings. The Chinese characters for Momiji, "紅葉", is a combination of Chinese character "Red" and "Leaves" which can be also pronounced as "Kouyou" meaning literally "Colored Leaves (in fall)". In fact Momiji tree is one of the major trees for the "Colored-Leaves Hunting" which I wrote previously a week ago. Thus the word "Momiji" is used for "colored leaves", as well.
You may think that colored leaves are not only in red color. Yes, actually the Japanese word "Kouyou", which I introduced in the previous paragraph, can be written using different Chinese characters "黄葉". This combination characters have the meaning of "Yellow" and "Leaves". In short, Japanese word for colored leaves, "Kouyou" can be written in both Chinese-character combinations of "Red Leaves" and "Yellow Leaves".
It is like playing with words. I think it would be one of the fun aspects of using ideographic characters for writing. However there is no Chinese-character combination for "Orange Colored-Leaves". Perhaps we should create that one, too.
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