Japanese Traditional Colours

Features

• 250 Japanese traditional colours, the standard extent of this set
• A kanji name and a romaji reading for every colour
• Search by kanji to get every value for one colour
• Search by romaji — the reading is as good a key as the characters
• Full-width romaji is accepted too, which is what a Japanese IME produces when you type Latin letters
• Reverse lookup: paste a value such as #dc9fb4 and it names the colour
• Partial matching: one character lists every name containing it
• Hex, RGB and HSL for every colour, each ready to paste into a stylesheet
• A swatch drawn on the result row, so you never have to convert a code in your head
• Each colour states whether black or white text reads better, with the WCAG contrast ratio and whether it reaches AA
• Empty input lists all 250 colours grouped by hue, as a browsable palette
• All 250 names sit in one searchable dropdown, findable by kanji, reading or value
• Values copy row by row, for dropping into a design file or code

How to use

1. Type a kanji name, or type the romaji reading if the characters escape you
2. Or paste a value such as #dc9fb4 to find out which colour it is
3. The result gives the kanji, the reading, the swatch, hex, RGB, HSL, the hue group, and which text colour reads better
4. Leave the box empty to list all 250 colours grouped by hue

FAQ

Is this the same set as the Chinese traditional colours?

They are two different sets of colours, not two names for one set. A few names look alike because both traditions borrowed from Chinese, but the membership, the values and the groupings differ. One name here also exists among the Chinese colours yet carries a different value, and others are peculiar to Japanese. They are shipped as two separate tools with their own data and their own text, neither merged nor translated into the other, because folding 250 Japanese names into a Chinese name list would make both worse at their job.

Why are the names not translated or transliterated?

Because the characters are the data being looked up. Replacing them with a translated colour phrase would collapse the distinctions between several of them, and those distinctions are exactly what you are searching for — a romaji reading and a kanji spelling are a pair, and breaking the pair loses the ability to search either way. So on the English page the kanji stay and the labels and explanations are translated. The same rule applies to the Chinese traditional colours on their own page.

Why do the values differ slightly from another site?

Because the mapping from a traditional name to a value is a modern editorial convention, not a standard. These values come from an open-source nipponcolors dataset under the MIT licence, and different colour charts disagree by several steps. Treat them as a widely used digital approximation: good enough to recognise a colour, name one, or find inspiration, but not a standard to match against for print or production. For anything that gets manufactured, use a physical colour chart.

Is the hue grouping a traditional classification?

No — it is computed from the hue. This set of 250 names carries no grouping of its own, and 250 rows in a flat list are not browsable, so they are bucketed coarsely into reds, oranges and browns, yellows, greens, blues and teals, purples, and neutral. The interface says so plainly rather than dressing it up as a traditional taxonomy. The grouping exists to let you scan; pinning down one colour is what the name search and the searchable dropdown are for.

I read Japanese but cannot write the character.

Type the romaji — several of these characters are ones Japanese speakers themselves routinely get wrong, so the reading is often the faster route in. Case does not matter, and full-width romaji is accepted: a Japanese IME produces full-width Latin letters when you type them, and the tool converts them back before matching.