Murasaki (紫) is the Japanese word for purple. It is also the name of a plant, and that double meaning is where this color starts to get interesting.
In the Japanese court, purple was not a matter of taste. Under the ritsuryō (律令) legal codes, the color of a garment was fixed by the wearer's rank, and purple was assigned to the senior ranks. The dye behind it came from the root of a plant that was hard to grow and gave up very little color for the labor spent on it.
So murasaki is not a swatch. It is a record of two things at once: who was permitted to wear it, and what had to be dug out of the ground to make it.
I am Kato Tsuyoshi, the third generation at Katouken (株式会社 加藤健旗店), a Kyoto workshop that has been making noren (のれん), the split fabric curtains hung in doorways, and flags since 1950. We sell natural dyes under thirty traditional color names, three of them in the purple family, so this is a color we get asked about.
This article works through what the word describes, and how rank and law put purple at the top of the court order. It then covers what the dye was made from, and where the names Edo murasaki, Kyo murasaki and kodai-murasaki came from.
Two things you will not find here. There are no hex or RGB values: color names and actual shades drifted against each other across periods and sources, and the dictionaries behind this article do not pin these names to a number.
And there is no flat statement that purple was banned in Japan. Something was restricted, and from a particular period onward, and the section on rank and law attaches the limits that sentence needs.
What Murasaki Means and Which Purple It Describes
In English, "purple" covers a wide band between red and blue and leaves it at that. Japanese drew lines inside that band, and the lines were fine enough that the dark end and the pale end had separate words.
The entry on murasaki in Shogakukan's Nihon Dai-hyakka Zensho (Nipponica), a Japanese encyclopedia collected on the reference site Kotobank, sets out two of those distinctions in passing. A strongly reddish purple was called ebi (葡萄), and murasaki was the bluer color beside it. Within murasaki itself, the entry says, koki (濃, "dark") on its own meant koki-murasaki, dark purple, and usu-iro (薄色, "pale color") on its own meant pale purple.
The vocabulary itself says something about the status of the color. Purple was distinct enough in it that the qualifiers for light and dark worked without the color word attached.
"Dark" meant dark purple. "Pale" meant pale purple.
That is the vocabulary. The shade those words pointed at is a separate question, and it sits further from what an English reader pictures as purple.
Murasaki Is Both a Color and a Plant
The plant called murasaki is a perennial, Lithospermum erythrorhizon, known in English as gromwell. The entry for shikon in JAANUS, the dictionary of Japanese art-historical terminology compiled by Dr Mary Neighbour Parent at Columbia University, describes it growing in Japan, on the Korean peninsula and in north-eastern China.
Shikon (紫根) is the purple dye taken from that plant's roots, and the word is built out of the same characters: shi (紫, purple) plus kon (根, root). So the chain runs in one direction. A plant is named murasaki, its root yields a dye, and the color that dye produces carries the plant's name.
That is worth separating from how an English color word behaves. An English speaker reaching for "purple" has no plant in mind. In Japanese the plant is still sitting inside the color name, which is why a question about what murasaki means turns into a question about a root fairly quickly.
The dye itself, and why so little of it came out of so much root, is the subject of the section on gromwell root.
Why Old Murasaki Reads Darker Than Modern Purple
The history of the word murasaki is covered in Shogakukan's Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, on the same Kotobank page. That entry records that from ancient times through the medieval period the shade of this color was reddish-black and muted.
Not violet. Not lavender. A dark, dulled, red-leaning purple.
Our own description of Kodai-murasaki says much the same thing from the dyer's side. It calls the color a subdued reddish-purple from the roots of the gromwell plant, set apart from the brighter "modern" purple of later eras by its deep, somber elegance.
One caution about that word "modern". In our description it means the brighter purple of later eras, which is to say the early modern period. It is not a reference to synthetic dye, and this article makes no comparison between natural and chemical purples.
The brightening happened inside the history of plant dyeing, and the names for it appear in the section on Edo murasaki and Kyo murasaki.
If your question is which color to hang in a doorway rather than where a color name came from, that is a different article. Our guide to noren color meaning handles what a color says in a doorway. This one stays with the color.
How Rank and Law Made Purple the Top Color at Court
Under the ritsuryō codes, what you wore was a statement about where you stood, and it was not a statement you were free to make. Clothing color was legislated, rank by rank. Purple shows this plainly, because the regulations graded the color itself as well as the people wearing it.
Two things happened, several centuries apart. A rank was named after the color, and then the color was taken away from general use. English-language writing about Japanese purple tends to collapse those into one sentence about a banned color, which loses the part that makes the history legible.
The Purple Cap of 647 and the Clothing Code
The Nipponica entry gives the dated anchor. In 647, the third year of Taika, under the system of thirteen cap ranks, a rank called shikan (紫冠, purple cap) was established. The color had a position in the hierarchy of office before it had a settled position in the wardrobe.
The clothing code of the Yōrō era then fixed the shades. Deep purple, fukamurasaki (深紫), was assigned to imperial princes and kings and to subjects of the first rank. Pale purple, asamurasaki (浅紫), went to kings of the second rank and below and to subjects of the second and third ranks.
Purple, then, was not one allowance handed to a band of people at the top. The color was split by depth, and the depth tracked the rank, so the difference between a dark purple robe and a pale purple robe was a difference in office.
The code also implies that dyers were working to a specification. A rule that distinguishes deep purple from pale purple needs someone who can reliably hit both, which brings the lye and the dye bath into the picture.
Our own description of Kodai-murasaki puts the same history in shorter form. In Japan, it says, purple has long been considered the highest-ranking color, strictly reserved for nobility and high officials since the Asuka period, around the seventh century.
Take that as our workshop's account of the color, which is how it reads on a product page. The dated, legislative anchor in the reference works is 647 and the Yōrō code. The two statements should not be welded into a claim that purple was fixed by law in the Asuka period.
What the Phrase Forbidden Color Actually Covered
Now the restriction. The Nipponica entry records that from the middle of the Heian period onward, dark purple was a kinjiki (禁色), a forbidden color, and that its general use was prohibited.
Three limits sit inside that sentence, and dropping any of them produces a different claim than the source makes.
- It was the dark purple. The same entry is the one that separates koki-murasaki from pale purple, so the distinction was available to the people writing the rules.
- It was from the middle of the Heian period. The purple cap of 647 is four centuries earlier, and the clothing code assigned purple rather than withholding it.
- It was general use that was prohibited. The rule operated against use by people outside the entitled ranks, which is what a kinjiki is.
Put those back and the sentence reads: from the mid-Heian period, dark purple was a forbidden color whose general use was prohibited.
What this source does not support is the broader version, that purple as such was illegal in Japan, or that nobody could wear it. Pale purple is in the same entry, and it is there as an allowance.
Whether the rule was obeyed is a separate question, and one the sources used here do not answer. A prohibition recorded in a code tells you what was written down, not what was worn.
This article is one in a series on single traditional colors. The other one published so far looks at aiiro (Japanese indigo), which covers the indigo blue that sits in the same dye range as these purples.
The Dye Itself: Gromwell Root and How It Was Worked
Rank explains who was allowed to wear purple. It does not explain why the color was difficult, and the difficulty came from the plant.
The written trace of murasaki as a working dye is administrative. The entry on natural dyes, tennen senryō (天然染料), appears in Morikita's Kagaku Jiten, a Japanese dictionary of chemistry on Kotobank. That entry explains that what is known of Japan's main early natural dyes comes from the Engishiki (延喜式), the detailed supplement to the ritsuryō codes compiled in 927.
Volume fourteen of that text covers the Nuidono-ryō (縫殿寮), the court sewing office. It records plant names as the dyes being produced, among them benibana (safflower), akane (madder), kihada (Amur cork tree), haze (wax tree), ai (indigo) and murasaki (gromwell).
The Engishiki is not a dyeing manual and not a complete inventory of Japanese dyes. It is a tenth-century set of administrative regulations in which those plant names appear, attached to the colors being dyed. What it establishes is that gromwell was on the court's list of dye plants by the early tenth century, in the same company as indigo and madder.
So the plant was in the system. The trouble was getting the color out of it.
How the Dye Was Made
The JAANUS entry on shikon describes the traditional process in four movements. The plants were picked. The roots were soaked in cold water. They were crushed in a mortar. They were then rubbed in hot water to make the dye.
Wood lye served as the mordant, the baisenzai (媒染剤), the substance that fixes a dye to fibre. The same entry adds the line that matters for the color names later in this article: a variety of purple hues was obtained depending on the quantity and type of wood lye used.
So the color was not decided by the root alone. The same roots, with a different quantity or a different kind of lye, came out as a different purple.
A dyer working this plant therefore had a range to move through rather than a single result to hit. The names for the purples at either end of that range come later, in the section on Edo murasaki and Kyo murasaki.
Two cautions on how to read that process. It is a reference work's account of how this dye was historically produced, not a method we are handing you, so there are no quantities, timings or repetitions here and none should be inferred. And it is not a description of our own workshop's process. We sell this color as a natural dye; the historical account of how the dye was made belongs to JAANUS, not to our workbench.
If a dye process at greater length is what you came for, our guide to aizome, Japanese indigo dyeing, follows one from start to finish.
True Purple and False Purple
The supply problem runs through the whole of this plant's history. The JAANUS entry puts it in two parts. The murasaki plant was difficult to cultivate, so dye-makers depended on gathering scarce wild plants. And the quantity of coloring matter contained in the roots was small.
Hard to grow, and thin yield from what you did get. Those two together explain why a purple garment was an expensive object quite apart from any rule about who could own one.
The consequence shows up by name in the Edo period. Sappanwood, suō (蘇芳), was used to obtain a purple dye known as nise-murasaki (偽紫, false purple), as against the original gromwell dye, hon-murasaki (本紫, true purple). The vocabulary itself is the evidence: a market grows a word for the false version of something when the real version is worth faking.
Note what the entry attributes the substitution to. It gives the difficulty of cultivation and the small amount of pigment in the roots. The sumptuary restrictions described in the previous section are not part of its explanation, and this article does not supply that link on its behalf.
One more limit. "Difficult to cultivate" means difficult to cultivate. The entry describes dye-makers relying on wild plants, and says nothing about the plant being unavailable, lost or gone. Gromwell is not a vanished species, and nothing here should be read that way.
A Plant Dye, Not a Shellfish Dye
A persistent claim in English-language writing about Japanese purple is that the dye came from shellfish. It is worth untangling, because the shellfish purple is real and famous, and it is somebody else's.
The entry on kaimurasaki (貝紫, "shell purple") in Nipponica describes a dye secreted by the hypobranchial gland of sea snails in the family Muricidae. Two Mediterranean species did the work, Hexaplex trunculus and Bolinus brandaris. The dye was used in ancient Phoenicia and Rome, where, in Roman times, it was applied only to the robes of the emperor and of senators, and was called imperial purple.
Japan took a different road, and the reason given is the one this section has already laid out. Because purple dye in Japan was taken from the murasaki plant, the entry says, this shellfish technique did not particularly develop there. The example it gives of what did happen is small and specific: ama (海女), the women divers of Shima, marked cloth using ibonishi, a local sea snail.
Keep that phrasing. "Did not particularly develop" is not the same as "did not exist", and the Shima example is in the entry precisely because something happened. The honest line is that Japan's purple tradition is a plant-dye tradition, and that the Mediterranean shellfish purple is a separate dye with a separate history.
Our thirty natural dye colors, purple among them, are in the natural dye collection.
Edo Murasaki, Kyo Murasaki, and the Shade Called Kodai-Murasaki
Three purple names come up again and again in English writing about Japanese color, usually presented as three shades on a chart. They are better read as three pieces of dating evidence.
The Nipponica entry puts two of them in the early modern period. In that era, a bluish, iki (粋) purple came to be called Edo murasaki, and a reddish, miyabi (雅) purple came to be called Kyo murasaki. The third name, kodai-murasaki, exists because of those two, and it comes at the end of this section.
As the previous section described, the hue a gromwell dye bath produced shifted with the quantity and type of lye. A vocabulary that splits purple into a bluer one and a redder one is a vocabulary built on top of a dye that actually moved that way.
Edo Murasaki, the Bluer Purple
Edo murasaki is the purple with blue in it. The adjective the Nipponica entry attaches to it is iki, the sharp, understated chic associated with the townspeople of Edo. The pairing is not accidental: a city's taste and a city's purple got the same label.
The name does not identify a dye, a plant or a mordant. It names a place and, through the place, a sensibility. Someone who said Edo murasaki was describing the kind of purple that looked right in Edo.
Kyo Murasaki, the Redder Purple
Kyo murasaki, from Kyoto, is the purple with red in it, and the word the entry pairs with it is miyabi, the courtly refinement of the old capital. Where Edo had iki, Kyoto had miyabi, and each city's purple carried its own adjective.
Two points on this pair, because both are easy to get wrong.
Neither purple is the better purple. The entry supplies two aesthetic words, iki and miyabi, and no ranking between them. English writing sometimes treats Kyo murasaki as the more refined of the two on the strength of miyabi, which is reading a judgement into a description.
And the name belongs to the early modern period. The Nipponica entry places both labels in that era, not in the Heian court, even though Kyoto had been the capital for centuries by then. A purple was being dyed in Kyoto long before anyone needed to call it Kyo murasaki; the name arrives when there is a rival name to distinguish it from.
Kodai-Murasaki, a Name for the Older Shade
The third name exists because of those two, and the Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten entry on the history of the word explains the sequence directly. From ancient times through the medieval period, the shade of this purple was reddish-black and muted.
Because the later purples were brighter, those later ones took the names Edo murasaki and Kyo murasaki, and the older shade came to be called kodai-murasaki (古代紫, "ancient purple") to tell them apart.
That is a naming event, not a dyeing event. Kodai-murasaki is the label the brighter purples made necessary, applied backwards to the color they had displaced. Nobody in the Heian period was dyeing a color called kodai-murasaki.
The name therefore carries no story of recovery. It does not mark a lost dye brought back, a technique rediscovered or a color revived. It marks a shade, told apart from a brighter shade that came later.
Our own page for Kodai-murasaki makes the same distinction in shorter form. It translates the name as "Ancient Purple" and describes the color as a subdued reddish-purple from gromwell root, distinguished from the brighter "modern" purple of later eras by its deep, somber elegance.
So the three names are not three fixed values. They are a record of when a purple was dyed and roughly how it leaned, and that is also why this article gives no numbers for any of them. A hex code found on a color-reference site is a present-day convention attached to a historical name, not a definition of the shade a historical dyer pulled out of a lye bath.
The Purple Colors in Our Natural Dye Range
The names in this article are not confined to dictionaries. They are still working color names, used on dye labels, and three of them sit in the range we sell: Kodai-murasaki, Usu-iro and Fuji-nezumi.
The words outlasted the uses they were made for. Usu-iro meant pale purple in classical Japanese, and usu-iro is also what is printed on a label in our range.
Kodai-Murasaki, the Deep Reddish Purple
Kodai-murasaki is the name this article has leaned on throughout. Our description translates it as "Ancient Purple" and sets out the history in a few lines.
Purple, it says, is the color long held to be of the highest rank, strictly reserved for nobility and high officials since the Asuka period, around the seventh century. It gives the color's source as the roots of the gromwell plant, and the color itself as a subdued reddish-purple, distinguished from the brighter purple of later eras by its deep, somber elegance.
Two of those lines have already been set beside reference works in this article. The dated anchors for the rank system are 647 and the Yōrō clothing code, and the reddish-black, muted character of the old shade is what the dictionary of the Japanese language records. The link to the product page is in the previous section, where the name was explained.
What I would add from the workbench is this: a dark red-leaning purple behaves differently from a bright one on cloth. It reads as weight rather than as brightness, which is a plausible reason the court code bothered to distinguish deep purple from pale purple at all.
Usu-iro, the Pale Purple of Classical Japanese
Usu-iro is the other end of the same family. Literally, usu-iro means "pale color" and names no hue at all. Our description explains what it does in practice: in Japanese tradition and classical literature, it refers specifically to a pale shade of purple.
Set that beside the Nipponica entry quoted earlier, which records that in classical usage, usu-iro on its own meant pale purple. A reference work on court custom and a product page written in a Kyoto workshop, with no connection between them, describe the same usage. The name on the label and the word in the dictionary point at the same color.
Our description also places the color's origin with its darker relative. Usu-iro comes from the gromwell root, the same precious material used for Kodai-murasaki, and the color is made by dyeing the fabric lightly and delicately.
That is the workshop's account of where the color comes from and how lightly it is dyed. Browse Usu-iro if you want to see the pale end of this family.
Fuji-nezumi, Where Purple Meets Grey
The third name sits on a border. Fuji (藤) is the wisteria, whose flowers are pale purple; nezumi (鼠) is the mouse, and the word does duty for grey in Japanese color names. Put them together and you have a name that reaches into purple from the grey side.
Our description of Fuji-nezumi explains the culture that produced names like this one. During the Edo period, the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, bright colors were often restricted, which led to the development of shijūhatcha hyakunezumi (四十八茶百鼠, "48 browns and 100 greys"), a culture of enjoying nuanced, understated shades.
Read that phrase as a phrase. Nobody counted out forty-eight browns and a hundred greys and closed the list.
The expression says that the muted end of the palette was subdivided and named in unusual detail. A name like fuji-nezumi is what that detail looks like from the inside: not grey, not purple, but the specific place where one runs into the other.
Thirty colors is thirty colors, not the whole of the Japanese palette, and our range is a selection rather than a canon. What it does offer is the chance to pick a color knowing what its name is actually saying.
I am Kato Tsuyoshi, the third generation at Katouken in Kyoto, where we have been making noren and flags since 1950. Working with dyed cloth day to day is what sent us reading dictionaries about purple.
See the color this article has been circling at Kodai-murasaki.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does murasaki mean in Japanese?
Murasaki (紫) is the Japanese word for the color purple. It is also the name of a plant, the perennial Lithospermum erythrorhizon, called gromwell in English, whose root yields the purple dye shikon (紫根).
The color name and the plant name are the same word, which is a fair summary of how traditional Japanese color names work: they tend to record where the color came from. Our own dye range uses the word in the color name Kodai-murasaki, and the pale purple of the same family is called Usu-iro.
What does the color purple mean in Japan?
Historically, it meant rank. Under the ritsuryō codes the color of clothing was fixed by the wearer's position, and purple was assigned to the senior ranks. Deep purple went to imperial princes and kings and to subjects of the first rank, and pale purple to the ranks below them.
From the middle of the Heian period, dark purple was a forbidden color whose general use was prohibited. Our own description of Kodai-murasaki puts it in shorter form, as the color long held to be of the highest rank and reserved for nobility and high officials.
Was purple a forbidden color in Japan?
Part of it was, for part of Japanese history. The Nipponica entry on murasaki records that from the middle of the Heian period onward, dark purple was a kinjiki (禁色), a forbidden color, and that its general use was prohibited.
Three qualifications travel with that. It was the dark purple rather than purple in general, it was from the mid-Heian period rather than throughout, and the rule addressed general use outside the entitled ranks. Pale purple appears in the same entry as an allowance tied to rank.
What is the difference between Edo murasaki and Kyo murasaki?
They are early modern names for two leanings of the same color. According to the Nipponica entry, a bluish purple described as iki (粋), the understated chic of Edo, came to be called Edo murasaki. A reddish purple described as miyabi (雅), the courtly refinement of Kyoto, came to be called Kyo murasaki.
Neither is presented as superior to the other. Both labels belong to the early modern period rather than to the Heian court, even though Kyoto was the capital long before the name existed.
Why is it called kodai-murasaki (ancient purple)?
Because a brighter purple came along and needed telling apart from an older one. The Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten entry on the word's history records that from ancient through medieval times this purple was reddish-black and muted.
The same entry records that the later, brighter purples took the names Edo murasaki and Kyo murasaki, while the older shade was called kodai-murasaki to distinguish it. The name marks a shade, by contrast with a later one. It does not record a revival or a rediscovery.
Is Japanese purple the same as Tyrian purple?
No, they are different dyes from different kingdoms of life. Tyrian purple, kaimurasaki (貝紫) in Japanese, comes from the hypobranchial gland of Mediterranean sea snails in the family Muricidae. In Roman times it was used for the robes of the emperor and senators and called imperial purple.
Japan's purple came from the root of the murasaki plant. The Nipponica entry on kaimurasaki states that because of this, the shellfish technique did not particularly develop in Japan, beyond ama (海女) divers in Shima marking cloth with a local snail.
