Korean pop culture, in numbers

The animal years of Korean actors who reached a Netflix chart

Does the year someone was born pick out who ends up on a Netflix chart?

1047 actors. Chance would put 87.3 in each sign. The count runs from 76 to 103.

Why it is worth counting at all: in a 2026 national survey of 1,200 people aged 13 to 69, 62.3% of Koreans said they had had their fortune read at least once, and the country has 15,853 registered fortune-telling businesses. The article explains what they are looking at.

Every sign, in order

Animal yearActorsShareAgainst 87.3 expected
Rat898.5%+1.7
Ox827.8%-5.3
Tiger787.4%-9.3
Rabbit868.2%-1.3
Dragon908.6%+2.7
Snake767.3%-11.3
Horse777.4%-10.3
Goat918.7%+3.7
Monkey918.7%+3.7
Rooster928.8%+4.7
Dog1039.8%+15.7
Pig928.8%+4.7

People. One row is one actor, counted once. Listed in the order of the cycle, not by size.

Chi-square 7.77 against a 5% threshold of 19.68. The distribution is indistinguishable from chance.

What this does not say

A flat distribution says the birth year does not select who reaches a chart. It says nothing about what a reading means to the person who has one, which is not a thing a count can reach.

A full saju needs the hour of birth. Public profiles carry dates and almost never hours, so we can count how a thousand actors are distributed and we cannot produce any one of their charts.

The Korean year turns in early February, not on 1 January, so anyone born in January or February may belong to the previous animal. Those people are left without a sign rather than given the wrong one.

When they started

Age at first credited workActors
Lower quarter begins18
Median21
Upper quarter begins23

Measured on 760 actors whose first working year is recorded. Half of them started between 18 and 23.

How this was counted

How far an actor's titles travel · Who gets looked up · How we count

What we wrote from this data