19 September 2022
Colors and the names Japanese people know them by reflect a minimum of three different sources over time.
Those different sources are easy to identify. And from two unexpected angles: grammar and orthography.
The oldest notions of color in Japan are adjectival, and old Japanese adjectives are usually easy to spot because in the present tense—yes, adjectives are declined in Japanese, which is very cool to my mind—they end with an い (i). When contact with China and Korea began during the middle of the first millennium, CE, a wider range of colors entered the language as nouns (some of which were converted to い-ending adjectives and some of which were converted to non-declinable nominal adjectives that rely on the possessive particle, の or な (no or na), to modify other nouns). Lastly, there are colors that arrived as loanwords, written in an angular script called katakana, which marks them as non-Japanese in origin.
A mix of traditional and modern Japanese colors from my research.
As the list above notes, similar colors can have very different names. Two curiosities: the Japanese adjective for blue is actually closer to green within the popular imagination (and historical record). To wit, the color of the traffic light that prompts you to continue driving is considered blue in Japan. Hiro and I have had many arguments about that. lol
Also, the word for a true, vibrant yellow is Chinese in origin. Native Japanese plants could not produce the color the Chinese emperors coveted.
I have studied Japanese colors and frequently use them in my t-shirt designs.
There are some interesting patterns to observe. Many traditional colors are based on ancient dyes, like indigo, of course. But the number of times the fabric was dipped in its dye bath could result in a gradation of colors, each with unique names.
Other dye materials included wood barks—birch, rowan, ash, mulberry, and cedar—and nuts, like walnuts and chestnuts.
Many colors were named for the flowers they evoked: peony (a dark red-violet), azalea (a magenta color), kerria (a very yellow flower), wisteria (a pale purple), rape blossoms (a softer yellow), and cherry blossoms (a delicate pale pink).
The character for tea, a plant imported from China, appears in a lot of color names beyond that for brown. Muddier colors, where a little brown was mixed into the dye, are where we see them: willow tea, chestnut hull tea, red tea, Edo tea, black tea, white tea, pine tea, persimmon tea, mulberry tea….
As my studies progressed, I noticed very evocative color names. Some were named for famous people who wore the color often, like Danjūrō, the Edo Period kabuki actor, now immortalized as a soft brown. My favorite was a poetic name for black, nureba, literally wet wings, and a description of the glossy color of women’s hair, drawn back from the face.
One final curiosity caught my eye. Rats. At first I thought a rat color was similar to the French color puce, which translates in English to flea. But rat, and other colors with the character for rat within the name, like white plum rat, mountain grape rat, thin clouds rat, dove wing rat, indigo rat, and silver rat are simply colors with a ratty gray tint added.
