Skip to main content

19th Century Japanese Woodblock Prints Creatively Illustrate the Inner Workings of the Human Body

Folks with a passing knowledge of ukiyo-e, the Japanese woodblock print art form popular in the 17th through 19th centuries, will be familiar with its landscapes, as well as its portraits of courtesans and kabuki actors. But often these prints were educational, demonstrated by these very odd anatomical prints that promote good health as it relates to our internal workings.

Long before animated monsters warned us about our mucus-filled chests, Japanese artists like Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1865) filled the guts of these men and women with little workers, making sure the human body worked like a functioning village or town.

In the first print, Inshoku Yojo Kagami (“Mirror of the Physiology of Drinking and Eating”), a man dines on fish and drinks sake. Inside, little men scurry about a pool wrapped in intestines, stoke a fire under the heart, all the while a scholar keeps reference materials nearby. Down below lonely figures guard the “urine gate” and the “feces gate,” surely one of the worst jobs in all the body economy.

One of Kunisada’s students created a print for the women, focusing on the reproductive organs, called Boji Yojo Kagami (“Rules of Sexual Life”). Keen eyed viewers will note that the miniature workers here are all women, so at least there’s some equality at play.

The two prints were meant as instructional, pointing out best health practices, and warning against overindulgence and excess.

Other prints are just as inventive: a back and abdomen covered in children playing familiar games; another featuring popular kabuki actors standing in for various organs. (Now, that is just crying out for a modern remake). The last print shows a pregnant woman whose belly contains Tainai jukkai no zu (Ten realms within the body), a Buddhist idea that you can read more about here. As for their function inside the womb, that is for others of a higher consciousness to discern.

via Spoon & Tamago

Related Content:

Mapping Emotions in the Body: A Finnish Neuroscience Study Reveals Where We Feel Emotions in Our Bodies

A Subway Map of Human Anatomy: All the Systems of Our Body Visualized in the Style of the London Underground

“Man as Industrial Palace,” the 1926 Lithograph Depicting the Human Body as a Modern Factory, Comes to Life in a New Animation

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

19th Century Japanese Woodblock Prints Creatively Illustrate the Inner Workings of the Human Body is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooksFree Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2Lp3iMK
via Ilumina

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...

Board Game Ideology — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #108

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_108_10-7-21.mp3 As board games are becoming increasingly popular with adults, we ask: What’s the relationship between a board game’s mechanics and its narrative? Does the “message” of a board game matter? Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by game designer Tommy Maranges , educator Michelle Parrinello-Cason , and ex-philosopher Al Baker to talk about re-skinning games, designing player experiences, play styles, game complexity, and more. Some of the games we mention include Puerto Rico, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Sorry, Munchkin, Sushi Go, Welcome To…, Codenames, Pandemic, Occam Horror, Terra Mystica, chess, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Photosynthesis, Spirit Island, Escape from the Dark Castle, and Wingspan. Some articles that fed our discussion included: “ The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism ” by Luke Winkie “ Board Games Are Getting Really, Really Popular ” by Darron Cu...