Book - A Dictionary of Color Combinations - Sanzo Wada

These two pocket volumes gather the colour work of Sanzo Wada (和田三造), the painter and colour researcher who produced Japan's first published collection of colour combinations. They are working references rather than display books, small enough to keep on the desk or carry to a fabric shop, with the colours reproduced from Wada's own source books of the 1930s.

Wada Sanzo (1883 to 1967) trained as a Western-style painter under Kuroda Seiki, won early recognition at the national art exhibitions, and in 1954 received an Academy Award for costume design for the film Gate of Hell (地獄門). Alongside his painting he founded the Japan Standard Colour Association, later the Japan Colour Research Institute, and set about recording how colours behave together. In the early 1930s that work became the haishoku sōkan (配色總鑑), a six-volume reference of 348 combinations, each swatch hand-painted on matte paper and pasted onto the page. It was the first work of its kind in Japan, made at a moment when the country was taking in Western pigments and design while rethinking its own long tradition of colour.

Volume 1 reprints that original collection in full: 348 combinations of two, three and four colours, laid out as plain colour blocks set side by side, with every colour carried through to a printed CMYK value and a colour chip. A commentary by Ōmi Gentarō of the Japan Colour Research Institute sets the work in context, and the text runs in Japanese and English.

Volume 2, the ōyō-hen (応用編) or applied edition, draws on two later works, the haishoku sōkan B volume (1934 to 1935) and a 1938 pattern collection. It opens with 72 seasonal palettes of three to seven colours, one set for each month of the year, then gives 161 worked examples from the fashion, interiors and graphic design of early Showa Japan. The traditional colour names, chōshun-iro (長春色), hana-asagi (花浅葱), ume-nezu (梅鼠) and many more, appear with English translations, and a sheet of 172 cut-out colour chips is bound in at the back.

• Volume 1: Taisho and Showa colour notes: 348 colour combinations from the original haishoku sōkan; CMYK values and colour chips throughout; commentary by Ōmi Gentarō; Japanese and English; A6 paperback, 336 pages;
• Volume 2: colour and product design (applied edition): 72 seasonal multi-colour palettes and 161 design examples; traditional colour names with English translations; 172 cut-out colour chips at the back; Japanese and English; A6 paperback, 336 pages;
• Author: Sanzo Wada (1883 to 1967);
• Publisher: Seigensha, Kyoto;
• Format: A6, roughly 148 × 105 mm, sized for the pocket.

Note: the swatches are offset-printed reproductions of Wada's hand-painted originals, so they are a printer's reading of the source rather than the painted colour itself. The printed CMYK values are the reliable reference for reproduction.

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Seigensha (青幻舎) is a Kyoto art-book publisher established in 1995, working across art, painting, photography, design, architecture and craft, with a catalogue of more than 900 titles. Its reissues of Wada's colour books have become long-sellers well beyond Japan and are carried by museum and design shops internationally.