The book
Sanzo Wada (和田三造, Wada Sanzō, 1883–1967) was a painter who worked on colour as a practical problem: what to put next to what. Between 1933 and 1935 the Tokyo publisher 博美社 issued his 配色総鑑 (Haishoku Sōkan) in instalments. Each plate is a short row of colour chips butted against one another, named in Japanese and again in English. There is almost nothing else on the page. Most of it is blank paper.
The English names are not translations of the Japanese, and the printer misspelled some of them. The Japanese names use pre-war kana. Furukara shows both as the book has them, and marks anything it has altered.
- 桔梗色 bellflower Blue Violet
- 一斤染 Cameo Pink
- 深川鼠 Fukagawa mouse grey Light Glaucous-Blue
- 白茶 white tea brown Ivory Buff
- 納戶鼠 storeroom mouse grey Green Blue
- 瓶覗 glimpse into the dye-vat Pale King's Blue
- 媚茶色 alluring tea brown Pale Raw Umber
- 玉蜀黍色 maize Cinnamon Buff
- 灰汁色 Ecru
- 薄色 pale Grayish Lavender
- 檜皮色 cypress bark Raw Sienna
- 薄紅 pale safflower red Eosine Pink
- 薄色 pale Grayish Lavender
- 菜種油色 Citron Yellow
- 淡卵色 pale egg Pale Lemon Yellow
- 深川鼠 Fukagawa mouse grey Light Glaucous-Blue
- 銀鼠 silver mouse grey Neutral Gray
- 栗皮色 chestnut bark Victoria Lake
- 花淺葱 flower pale indigo Cerulean Blue
Six plates as the app draws them. Each line gives the Japanese name as the book prints it, then its literal sense in brackets where it has one, then the English name from Ridgway’s standard. The printer misspelled a few of those English names; the app shows the misspelling alongside the correct form, this page just uses the correct one.
Through time and space
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1933
配色総鑑 · Tokyo
Sanzo Wada publishes plate after plate over two years, each colour named in Japanese and again in English. He is a painter, and those English names are a quotation. Of the 180 English names on the plates, 144 come from one book, an index of colour chips from the American naturalist Robert Ridgway.
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1912
Color Standards and Color Nomenclature · Washington
Ridgway (1850–1929) prints 1,115 colours as named chips, at his own expense. Vernonia Purple. Laelia Pink. Hay’s Russet. Cotinga Purple, which takes its name from a bird of tropical America and is printed in Tokyo beside 杜若色, an iris. All of this was in pursuit of a common language to describe the colours of the natural world.
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1875
A History of North American Birds
Ridgway is an ornithologist, curator of birds at the Smithsonian, and he has a problem no dictionary solves: a bird’s throat is never simply brown. Describing plumage so that another naturalist reads it the same way is the whole of the work, and the words for it do not exist yet. So he makes them, a first attempt in 1886 and the full 1,115 in 1912. The hand-coloured plates of this book, which he wrote with Baird and Brewer, are the birds in Furukara.
So the English on a Tokyo colour compendium of 1933 runs back to an American trying to say exactly what colour a bird’s throat was. Furukara shows Ridgway’s birds alongside Wada’s colours, connecting the story from beginning to end.
Where the colours come from
All of them were measured from the public-domain scans held by the National Diet Library. Nothing was copied from a modern reprint or from an existing digital colour list. Those were used only to check the results afterwards.
Measurement is done in CIELAB under D50, and each plate is normalised to its own paper white, because the sheets are more than ninety years old and have not aged evenly. When one colour appears on several plates and those plates disagree, the app reports how far apart they are.
What is in it
One way in starts from a single colour and shows the chips Wada set beside it. Another takes a phrase, such as a rainy evening at dusk, and returns the plates that answer to it. A photograph can be matched against a whole scene or against one thing in it. The monthly schemes of B篇 run through the year in the order your own hemisphere sees them, and the book can be read straight through, plate by plate, at proportions measured from the scans.
Two parts of the app are not Wada’s work, and say so on the screen. The first is 492 birds cut from the hand-coloured plates of the 1875 book above, each with its species name, its current accepted name, its Japanese name where it has one, and the colours measured from the printed bird. The second is sixty colour sets made by applying Wada’s own habits of selection to the 1,115 colours of Ridgway’s standard, under the heading modern additions.
Testing
Furukara is in beta on TestFlight before its first release. It runs on iPhone and works offline. There is no account to make.
Contact
Corrections are welcome: a name that reads wrong, or a bird that is not the bird it claims to be. hello@furukara.com