Japanese prints show tiny workers running the human body
Some of them tend a pool ringed by intestines. My favorite is the scholar, sitting off to the side with his reference books. At the bottom of the body, two figures stand guard at the "urine gate" and the "feces gate." Open Culture has gathered this print with several others in the same mode, the work of ukiyo-e artists including Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865).
- ▪Some of them tend a pool ringed by intestines.
- ▪My favorite is the scholar, sitting off to the side with his reference books.
- ▪At the bottom of the body, two figures stand guard at the "urine gate" and the "feces gate." Open Culture has gathered this print with several others in the same mode, the work of ukiyo-e artists including Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865).
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Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/08/03/ukiyo-e-body-prints.html |
| Publication time | Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:32:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-03T16:45:46.908Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-03T16:45:46.908Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Wvi_gMPhGQPv · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Japanese prints show tiny workers running the human body Popkin 9:32 am Mon Aug 3, 2026 Japanese woodblock prints — National Library of Medicine / no known copyright restrictions (Wikimedia Commons) Inshoku Yojo Kagami, or "Mirror of the Physiology of Drinking and Eating," is a nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock print of a man eating fish and drinking sake, with his torso cut away to show the crew of tiny workers keeping him going. Some of them tend a pool ringed by intestines. One stokes a fire under the heart. My favorite is the scholar, sitting off to the side with his reference books.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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