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.
| Animal year | Actors | Share | Against 87.3 expected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rat | 89 | 8.5% | +1.7 |
| Ox | 82 | 7.8% | -5.3 |
| Tiger | 78 | 7.4% | -9.3 |
| Rabbit | 86 | 8.2% | -1.3 |
| Dragon | 90 | 8.6% | +2.7 |
| Snake | 76 | 7.3% | -11.3 |
| Horse | 77 | 7.4% | -10.3 |
| Goat | 91 | 8.7% | +3.7 |
| Monkey | 91 | 8.7% | +3.7 |
| Rooster | 92 | 8.8% | +4.7 |
| Dog | 103 | 9.8% | +15.7 |
| Pig | 92 | 8.8% | +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.
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.
| Age at first credited work | Actors |
|---|---|
| Lower quarter begins | 18 |
| Median | 21 |
| Upper quarter begins | 23 |
Measured on 760 actors whose first working year is recorded. Half of them started between 18 and 23.
How far an actor's titles travel · Who gets looked up · How we count
The counting on this page is about the group. If you want the individual names, they are on the table above, and each one links to that person’s own page — what they have been in, how many countries it charted in, and who else was born on the same day.
A birth year is not a reading. Sharing a year with IU means sharing a birth year and nothing else. We counted whether the birth-year spread picks out who gets famous, and it does not — the test is on this page.
This page sorts people by the year they were born. There is a second axis that almost nobody counts: the day pillar, the two characters for the day itself. We built it for 9,249 Korean entertainers — every English saju site reads one chart at a time, so nobody had a denominator until now.
Two axes, not the same count twice. A birth year gives the zodiac sign on this page; a birth date gives the day pillar on that one. One of the four tests over there crossed the chance line, and we published everything we did to try to kill it rather than calling it a finding.
We sorted 1,047 Korean stars into twelve rooms by birth year — IU with 91 other Roosters, Bae Suzy with 102 other Dogs. Then we tested whether the zodiac picks out who ends up on a chart. Chi-square 7.77 against a threshold of 19.68.
22 August 2026
Korean stars are born in the first quarter 1.31 times as often as in the third. The test clears its threshold by 0.24, and removing any one of those 385 people puts it back below. Here is the finding we did not publish, and why.
21 August 2026
We sorted 1,047 Korean actors and singers into the twelve zodiac signs. Go Youn-jung leads the Rat, Kim Seon-ho the Tiger, Im Yoon-ah the Horse. The spread across the twelve is indistinguishable from chance, and we counted that ourselves.
21 August 2026
The animal year and saju are two different things, and Koreans use both. We counted the animal years of 1,047 Korean actors who reached a Netflix chart: chance would put 87.3 in each sign, and the count runs 76 to 103.
10 August 2026