Color as relationship, not rule.

Haishoku (配色) is usually translated as “color scheme”. Read as two characters, it is closer to arranging (配) colors (色). Wada's books don't start from a hue wheel or a formula like “complementary” or “triadic”. Each page is a finished, numbered set of two, three or four colors, meant to be used together.

Wada (1883–1967) was a painter, teacher and costume and kimono designer. He won an Academy Award for the costumes of Gate of Hell (地獄門, 1953). Seigensha's 2010 edition, A Dictionary of Color Combinations, brought the first series back into print. Its 2020 Vol. 2 collects the seasonal B-hen palettes and later design combinations.

Here each combination is drawn as a small composition rather than a row of chips. The quietest color holds the ground and the loudest gets the smallest area. That layout is our illustrative reading, computed from each color's OKLCH chroma; Wada did not specify it. Every color shows its English and Japanese name, hex, RGB and OKLCH, ready to copy.