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Lucia Dolce's "The worship of celestial bodies in Japan: politics, rituals and icons" is the editor's introduction. Dolce skilfully frames the collected essays within a threefold analytical schema of: (1) "diversity of agents and sponsors"; (2) "application of the knowledge of stars to different levels of the public and private realms"; and (3) "the ritual interpretation of deified celestial bodies, with its changing iconography, liturgical practices and legitimizing function". In "The Tokugawa Shoguns and Onmyodo" Hayashi Makoto introduces Japanese Yin-Yang belief and practice in relation to stars, and the little-studied involvement of the Edo military rulers. Individual shoguns adopted varying attitudes to Onmyodo and the influence of stars, and nationwide control of the cult passed finally to the Tsuchimikado Onmyodo specialists. Hayashi argues that the suppression of the Tsuchimikado in 1870 was to remove hereditary prerogatives and not to eradicate "false creeds". John Breen's fascinating study of Edo calendars and almanacs ("Inside Tokugawa religion: stars, planets, and the calendar-as-method") emphasizes the ubiquity of knowledge about star rituals evidenced by printed material (4.5 million calendars produced annually by the 1840s and an almanac for every village). Breen documents the calendrical-astrological structuring of time and space and crucially asks how extensively print prescriptions were...