In 1868, the Japanese medical profession experienced a drastic change accompanying the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate. The new Meiji government initiated the reconstruction of the basis of medical knowledge from the traditional medicine of east-Asian culture to the modern medicine which was forming in Western culture at that time. Modern medicine, especially detailed anatomical charts, was symbolic of the advanced knowledge of the newly introduced Western culture (the so-called Bunmei-Kaika, or civilization enlightenment). Anatomy, as a branch of medical discipline, had reached a highly advanced stage by the second half of the nineteenth century and the Japanese common people at that time could not access the knowledge of human anatomy. During the Edo period, the common Japanese notion of human organs, which were called Gozo-Roppu, was that they were scattered inside of the body. This notion was completely dissimilar to that of modern medicine: ‘the organs are systematically compacted inside of the human body’. Then, by various means, this information was disseminated among the common people at the beginning of the Meiji-era. In this research project, we analysed a group of cheap prints, called Jintai-Mondou (textbooks on questions and answers concerning the human body), which were published in the latter half of the 1870s. Jintai-Mondou had been published as textbooks for the elementary schools, and because of the absence of strict government regulation at the time, they had been freely written and edited by rural intellectuals of various social, educational, and cultural backgrounds. We collected all books titled Jintai-Mondou, which were published in the Meiji period and were preserved in Japan. Through the investigation of the process of copying and modifying these books, we were able to consider the alteration process of the image of the inner ‘human body’. As a result, we can reconstruct the process of dissemination of the western understanding of the anatomical body to the Japanese common people at the beginning of the Meiji era.