---
name: "Japanese Anatomical Woodblock Prints"
subtitle: "Tiny workers run the body like a village, one gate labeled 'urine'"
date: 2026-07-25
shortlist: true
link: "https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/hb9q2nb8tf/"
linkText: "calisphere.org"
source: "Open Culture"
topics: [history-and-archives, design-and-art]
tags: [ukiyo-e, anatomy, japan, woodblock-prints]
description: "A 19th-century ukiyo-e print, Inshoku Yojo Kagami, staffs the human digestive system with tiny workers — scholars, stokers, and two very unlucky gatekeepers."
---

Utagawa Kunisada's Inshoku Yojo Kagami ("Mirror of the Physiology of Drinking and Eating") turns a man's dinner into an org chart: little figures scurry around a pool wrapped in intestines, stoke a fire under the heart, and consult a scholar with reference books on hand. Two lonely posts, guarding the "urine gate" and the "feces gate," are surely the worst jobs in the body's economy. UCSF's Japanese Woodblock Print Collection has the full-resolution scan.