Korean pop culture, in numbers

The day pillars of 9,249 Korean entertainers — BTS land on 6 of the ten

Does any day pillar show up more often than chance among Korean entertainers — and among the most-linked of them?

Read this first — this is not a reading

A day pillar is one of four pillars, and the fourth cannot be built here: public records carry birth dates and almost never birth hours. Nothing on this page says what any pillar means for any person. The only question asked is whether the spread across the pillars is further from flat than chance would produce.

A day pillar is one of the four pillars. The hour pillar cannot be built here: public records carry birth dates and almost never birth hours.

Counting who exists is not counting who succeeded. Sitelink counts are a proxy for how widely a person is written about, not for talent, income or chart position.

People whose birth date is recorded only to the month or year were left out and counted separately, not folded in as zeroes.

The ten day stems, with the names in each

9,249 people, each placed by the day they were born. A flat spread would put 924.9 in every column. The third column is the most-linked tenth of the same people (925 of them, those with at least 14 Wikipedia editions) — the test for whether any pillar crowds the famous end.

Day stemAllMost-linked tenthBest-known names in this stem
Gyeong984106Lee Jung-jae, Jung Ho-yeon, Momo
Sin96487Song Joong-ki, RM, Kim Soo-hyun
Gap94993ROSÉ, Jisoo, Kim Seok-jin
Eul94487V, J-Hope, Im Yoon-ah
Jeong940108IU, Kang Seul-gi, Jimin
Byeong92790Jungkook, Chun Jung-myung, Daniel Dae Kim
Gye91489Yun Hyon-seok, Cho Jung-seok, BoA
Mu90582Irene, Gong Yoo, Taeyeon
Im89094Psy, Lee Min-ho, Jennie
Gi83289Suga, Bae Suzy, Ken Jeong

Chi-square 17.91 against a threshold of 16.92 at nine degrees of freedom — above the line. For the most-linked tenth, 6.77 against the same threshold.

The twelve day branches

Day branchAllMost-linked tenth
Yu80265
Ja79779
O78977
Hae78583
Myo78068
In77876
Sul77472
Sin76779
Mi75984
Sa75879
Jin75082
Chuk71081

Chi-square 8.8 against 19.68 at eleven degrees of freedom — below the line. Most-linked tenth, 5.05.

One of these four tests crossed the line. We are not calling it a finding

One of our four tests crossed the 0.05 line. Before treating that as a finding we tried to kill it, and we publish what we tried whether or not it worked.

What we triedPeopleChi-square
Everyone9,24917.91
Administrative-looking dates dropped (01-01, 12-31, 01-15, 07-01, 03-01)9,09117.77
Born 1900–19691,49115.69
Born 1970–19894,17316.1
Born 1990–20293,5858.31

Dates that look administrative rather than remembered (1 January and the like) were dropped. If they were driving the result, dropping them would move it.

Day stem and day branch, each for everyone and for the most-linked tenth. With four independent tests at the 0.05 level, one crossing happens by chance roughly one time in five.

So: dropping the suspicious dates does not move it, no single era crosses on its own, the most-linked tenth does not cross, and the day branch does not cross. A single marginal crossing out of four tests is what chance produces about one time in five. We publish the number, we publish everything we tried to kill it, and we do not tell you that a day stem does anything.

Two groups everyone knows, looked up one member at a time

We picked these two groups because their names are widely known, not by sampling. Members are resolved by Wikidata membership in both directions (P463 and P527), never by matching a stage name: an earlier version of this table attached BLACKPINK's Lisa to a different person born in 1980. Where an item carries no English label we fall back to an English alias and then to the Korean label, so nobody is dropped for want of a name. Only best-ranked birth dates are read, because an older low-precision statement had us report one member as undated when her date is on record to the day.

BTS — 7 of 7 members have a birth date on record to the day, and they land on 6 different day stems

MemberBornDay pillarCitizenship on record
Kim Seok-jin1992-12-04甲寅South Korea
Suga1993-03-09己丑South Korea
J-Hope1994-02-18乙亥South Korea
RM1994-09-12辛丑South Korea
Jimin1995-10-13丁丑South Korea
V1995-12-30乙未South Korea
Jungkook1997-09-01丙午South Korea

Blackpink — 4 of 4 members have a birth date on record to the day, and they land on 3 different day stems

MemberBornDay pillarCitizenship on record
Jisoo1995-01-03甲午South Korea
Jennie1996-01-16壬子South Korea
ROSÉ1997-02-11甲申New Zealand, South Korea
Lisa1997-03-27戊辰Thailand

1 member here is not a South Korean citizen on the public record, so she is outside the 9,249 counted above. Shown here anyway, because dropping a member without saying so would make a group of four look like a group of three.

How this was counted

The same test on birth years, with names · The birth-year count that came out as chance · How we count

What we wrote from this data