The book
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 borrowed from Robert Ridgway’s 1912 colour standard, 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.
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 A History of North American Birds (1875), 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 plates he never made.
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