It’s the entry for Galaxy, and originally appeared in Daizenshuu 7:
Galaxy
A local collection of stars and planets in outer space. A nebula is a collection of stars and planets, and in turn a collection of several nebulae is called a galaxy. Being responsible for the north/south/east/west, the four Kaios in practice oversee these galaxies. The divides between north/south/east/west galaxies are units which the celestial gods and Kaios produced for occupational purposes, in order to unify the galaxies which exist infinitely in outer space.
First, I’m told the astronomy here is basically hopeless, at least as far as the real world goes. In reality, nebulae are not subdivisions of galaxies, but I suppose things must be different in DB World. Confusing the matter is that the Japanese word for nebula used here, 星雲/
sei’un, is sometimes used to mean galaxy, as a holdover from the days before modern astronomy. That’s actually that’s where the character Zeiun in DBZ movie 4 gets his name from: Slug’s henchmen Angiras, Dorodabo, Medamatcha, and Zeiun are collectively a pun on アンドロメダ星雲/
Andoromeda-sei’un, “Andromeda Galaxy”, even though アンドロメダ銀河/
Andoromeda-Ginga is the more standard Japanese name for the place. This might partially explain why the book treats
sei’un and
ginga as simply smaller and bigger versions of fundamentally the same type of thing.
The other annoying thing is how 星/
hoshi can potentially mean either “star” or “planet” depending on the context. There are other more technical words specific to each one, but in everyday Japanese they’ve got
hoshi as a catch-all term, another holdover from pre-modern times when every shiny thing in the sky was treated as the same. Here we’ve got the quasi-plural 星々/
hoshi-boshi, and it’s talking about what a galaxy consists of, so it seems most natural to treat it as referring to both stars and planets.
I suppose from a DB continuity standpoint, the big thing is that the last sentence seems to say that there are infinite galaxies (or at least that they exist infinitely, whatever the hell that means). This is of course perfectly reasonable by real-world standards (unless you take “infinite” literally), but the typical view with DB is that they are only supposed to be four: north, south, east, and west. This is actually what Daizenshuu 7/Chouzenshuu 4 itself specifically says several times elsewhere, despite seeming to say otherwise in this one entry. So take that as you will.
Also, since this entry originally appeared in Daizenshuu 7, it predates the notion of the DB World consisting of twelve universes, and Chouzenshuu 4 doesn’t update the entry to reflect this new idea. So all this talk about north/south/east/west galaxies and “infinitely existing” galaxies only refers to Universe #7. Even if Universe #7 has just the four galaxies, with eleven other universes out there, the grand total for the DB World would presumably be higher (it’s easy to assume the new total is 4x12=48, but each universe might not be so uniform).
