IU is a Rooster and Go Youn-jung a Rat. We checked whether that means anything, and it does not

IU was born in 1993, which makes her a Rooster. So were 91 other Korean stars in our panel. Bae Suzy is a Dog, in a room of 103. Ma Dong-seok is a Pig, Byeon Woo-seok a Goat, Cha Eun-woo of ASTRO an Ox, Im Yoon-ah of Girls’ Generation a Horse.

We have built those twelve rooms and put every name in them. Before doing it, we tested the question a reader would reasonably ask: does the year someone was born pick out who ends up on a Netflix chart?

It does not.

The twelve rooms

Each room is named for the most-read Korean star born in that year, across the Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai and Malay Wikipedias.

What we tested

If the zodiac had anything to do with who makes it onto a chart, the twelve rooms would not hold roughly equal numbers. One or two would be crowded and others thin.

Take 1,047 people and spread them evenly and each room holds about 87. The actual rooms run from 76 to 103. A chi-square test asks whether a spread that uneven is surprising: the answer is 7.77, against a threshold of 19.68 for eleven degrees of freedom.

Below the threshold means the pattern is what you would get from nothing at all. The Dog room is the biggest and the Snake room the smallest, and that gap is the size of gap you get by shuffling 1,047 birthdays at random.

So what the rooms are for

They are a way to sort a thousand names into pieces a person can actually read.

A list of 1,047 Korean stars is not a page anyone finishes. Twelve rooms of about ninety are. If you came here looking for IU, the Rooster room has her and 91 others born the same year, and some of those names will be new to you. That is the whole function.

A room name is not a reading. We are not saying anything about IU because she is a Rooster, and we could not: a full saju needs the hour of birth, and public profiles carry dates and almost never hours. We can count how a thousand people are distributed. We cannot produce any one of their charts, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What we left out rather than guessed

The lunar new year falls in January or February, which means anyone born in those two months might belong to the previous animal depending on the exact date. We do not guess. Those people are excluded from the sign counts entirely.

Of the 1,047 names, 818 have a read count we could measure. The rest keep their name in their room without a number beside it, because a person we could not match is not a person who was read zero times.

The twelve rooms are at the star rooms.

The tables behind this are at kculturewire.com/zodiac and kculturewire.com/star-signs.