Wada Sanzō

Wada Sanzō was born in 1883 in Ikuno, a mining town in the mountains of Hyōgo Prefecture (today part of Asago), and trained in yōga — Western-style oil painting — becoming a live-in student of Kuroda Seiki, the painter who had brought Impressionist light back from Paris a generation earlier, before graduating from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1904.

He was twenty-four when his monumental canvas South Wind (南風, 1907) — bare-chested seamen riding a swell, sun-struck and unsentimental — took the highest award given at the first Bunten, Japan's new national salon. The painting made his name; it now hangs in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, designated an Important Cultural Property. In 1909 he left for Europe as a government-sponsored student, working mainly in France and returning around 1915 by way of India and Singapore; from 1932 to 1944 he was professor of design at his alma mater.

Wada's second life was spent organizing color itself. In 1927 he founded the Japan Standard Color Association, which he reorganized in 1945 into the Japan Color Research Institute (日本色彩研究所) — still today the keeper of Japan's color standards — and in 1951 completed Iro no Hyōjun, Japan's first comprehensive standard color chart. Where his contemporaries painted with color, Wada catalogued, named and systematized it for industry. In 1958 the Japanese government named him a Person of Cultural Merit.

His feeling for color was not merely bureaucratic. For Kinugasa Teinosuke's Gate of Hell (地獄門, 1953), the first Eastmancolor film produced in Japan, Wada recreated the colors of Heian-period court dress — the film took the Grand Prix at Cannes, and at the 1955 ceremony Wada won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design.

Between 1933 and 1934 Wada published Haishoku Sōkan (配色総鑑), a six-volume dictionary of color combinations: 348 numbered plates pairing two, three or four of 159 colors, each named in Japanese and English. It was a working tool, aimed at kimono and textile designers, printers and commercial artists of early-Shōwa Japan — each color carrying both a traditional Japanese name and an English trade name of the period, a bridge between two color vocabularies.

The combinations still feel startlingly contemporary: muted earths against saturated primaries, off-kilter pastels, confident near-clashes. Seigensha's reissue, A Dictionary of Color Combinations (2010), returned the work to print and to designers' desks worldwide; a second volume followed in 2020, drawn from Wada's seasonal color patterns (1934–36) and his 1938 design collection.

Every color here carries its hex, RGB, CMYK, HSL and Lab values, click-to-copy; every plate can be exported as CSS variables, a Tailwind theme or JSON.

The original Japanese names had never been digitized before this site: all 171 were transcribed from photographs of the printed book's swatch index and verified against each color's plate numbers and CMYK values — nothing here is guessed. As far as we know, this is the first complete open mapping of Wada's Japanese and English color names.