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As you can see at the top of this answer, the [color] Scenes (Black Scene, Red Scene, etc.) in the Monogatari series all include a parenthesized number beneath the romanized form of the name of the color shown.

Here's a list of them:

ROMANIZED  GLOSS         NUMBER   KANJI(READING)
aka        "red"          (135)   赤　（あか） 
kuro       "black"        (629)   黒　（くろ）
shiro      "white"       (4646)   白　（しろ）
ki         "yellow"      (0303)   黄　（き）
ouchi      "lilac"        (349)   楝　（おうち）
ao         "blue"         (014)   青　（あお）
momo       "peach"        (372)   桃　（もも）
moegi      "light green"  (469)   萌黄（もえぎ）
murasaki   "purple"       (039)   紫　（むらさき）

Question: What do the numbers mean?

Possibilities:

  • Something to do with color codes (but this is unlikely because neither "white" nor "black" seems to have a special number)
  • Some sort of character code for either the kanji, the kana reading, or the romanized form (though I haven't come up with anything for this)
  • It's all a clever ruse by Shinbo to confuse us
  • ???
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senshin
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    the numbers has nothing to do with the UNICODE table, the unicode for kanji is listed here: http://www.rikai.com/library/kanjitables/kanji_codes.unicode.shtml and none of the UNICODE values match the numbers listed here – debal Mar 31 '14 at 13:54
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    In the olden days of when liquid paint was used for animation cells, each color had a number that corresponded to the [DIC (Dai Nippon Ink Company) color code index](http://www.dic-global.com/en/whats_dic/scene/scene01.html). So the numbers might have some sort of similar correspondence with in Shaft's color coordination department. – кяαzєя Apr 30 '14 at 19:42
  • In some episode's it gets noted that HGP mincho B has been used. Which I believe has a number correspondence to Characters, for example shi being (252). – Dimitri mx Jun 19 '14 at 21:43
  • @Dimitrimx Could you elaborate on what you mean by "shi being (252)"? – senshin Jun 19 '14 at 23:05
  • @Krazer FYI, I took a look through DIC's [COLORGUIDE app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.dic.colorguide.android) and was unable to find any correspondences. Could still be something SHAFT-internal, though. – senshin Jun 19 '14 at 23:25
  • In certain font's it is pretty common to have number equivalents of the characters your writing, for example [ms-mincho](http://fontzone.net/fontimage/c/ms-mincho.png). All tough I couldn't directly find the HGP mincho B chart, it might be related information to solve the mystery. – Dimitri mx Jun 20 '14 at 10:30
  • @Dimitrimx Those are Unicode codepoints (in decimal). They are the same for every font. I checked those already and couldn't find any correspondences – senshin Jun 20 '14 at 20:37
  • (I also checked EUC-JP and Shift-JIS codepoints; no dice there either.) – senshin Jun 20 '14 at 20:40

1 Answers1

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Most colors can be found in one form or another in image search results from Google (query color 8888). They seem to correspond to knitting yarn color codes. Some colors are in DMC chart, I couldn't find out where others are from.

Hakase
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    Can you elaborate with some concrete examples / links? There's all sorts of color-coding schemes out there, and unless a single scheme correctly matches up to all of the colors found in the show, I don't think I'll be convinced. – senshin Jan 30 '14 at 00:20
  • Well, that's the problem. I couldn't find a single scheme that contains all of these colors. I'm assuming there are some rares colors that aren't included in the common charts that are on the net. Still, you can find objects of that color on image search. – Hakase Jan 30 '14 at 09:54