The Fire Horse Birth-Rate Test

What happened in 1966 — and 1906

The 1966 collapse is one of the best-documented superstition effects in demography. Couples timed pregnancies around the year: Nippon.com's analysis of the official series notes births ran about 87,000 above expectation in 1965 and 123,000 above in 1967, as families shifted conceptions to either side of the unlucky year^[16]. Japan's total fertility rate dropped from 2.14 in 1965 to 1.58 in 1966, then recovered to 2.23 in 1967^[2]. A 1975 study in the Annals of Human Biology documented a rise in induced abortion in 1966 as part of the same avoidance behavior^[18], and economists have since used the year as a natural experiment in how belief moves fertility^[19].

1966 was not the first test. In the previous Fire Horse year, 1906, births fell to 1,394,295 from 1,452,770 in 1905 — a decline of about 4 percent — before jumping to 1,614,472 in 1907^[1]. The crude birth rate tells the same story: 29.6 births per 1,000 population in 1906, against 31.2 in 1905 and 34.0 in 1907^[2]. The effect was six times deeper in 1966 than in 1906: the superstition strengthened over sixty years of modernization rather than fading.

A note on the historical series: Japan's confirmed vital statistics count Japanese nationals in Japan, and figures for 1947–1972 exclude Okinawa^[1]. Neither caveat affects the size of the 1966 crater.

The 2026 early read

Zodiac-year timing complicates a clean 2026 reading, so this is an early read by design. In Japan the zodiac year is popularly reckoned by calendar year, meaning parents avoiding a Fire Horse baby would already be suppressing early-2026 births; under the lunisolar reckoning used across the Chinese-speaking world the year runs February 17, 2026 to February 5, 2027. The strictest test — babies conceived after the year began — only shows up in births from roughly November 2026 onward. What the official series show so far is below.

Japan: flat where 1966 cratered

Japan's monthly preliminary counts show no crater. January 2026: 58,694 births, up 0.5 percent from January 2025. February: 50,761, down 0.4 percent. March: 53,844, up 0.4 percent. April: 59,260, up 3.4 percent. Cumulative January–April: 222,559 births against 220,261 a year earlier, up 1.0 percent^[3]. A 1966-scale effect would have these months running about a quarter below the prior year; the observed deviation is one-twenty-fifth of that, in the wrong direction. The most recent monthly release, covering April, came out June 23, 2026^[4].

The structural context is doing most of the explanatory work. Japan's 2025 births were the lowest ever recorded — 671,236 on the definition used for annual statistics, a tenth consecutive annual decline, with the total fertility rate at a record-low 1.14^[5]. An April 2026 analysis by the Institute for Social Vision Design, using Japan Research Institute data, argues the superstition's disappearance from the data reflects exactly this: with fertility already at the floor and first births dominating, there is little discretionary childbearing left for a superstition to postpone^[17].

South Korea: a rebound the superstition has not dented

South Korea entered the Fire Horse year with births rising for 22 consecutive months, and every 2026 month published so far is up by double digits year on year: January 26,916 (+11.7 percent), February 22,898 (+13.6 percent), March 25,200 (+19.4 percent)^[7], and April 24,521 (+18.0 percent), for 99,534 cumulative births through April, up 15.5 percent^[9]. The 2025 base itself was a recovery year — all twelve 2025 months came in above their 2024 counterparts in the ministry's monthly releases^[6] — closing at 254.5 thousand births, up 6.8 percent from 2024, with the fertility rate rising to 0.80^[8].

Korea's horse-year belief (the 백말띠 "white horse" variant) is directed at girls born in horse years, and its documented historical effect was sex selection rather than fewer births overall: in the 1990 Horse year, South Korea's sex ratio at birth peaked at 116.5 boys per 100 girls^[20]. The belief still circulates — Korean media this January documented expectant mothers pressured over horse-sign daughters^[21] — but through April it has left no mark on totals. The 2026 sex ratio at birth, which Statistics Korea publishes with annual data, will be the number to check.

Taiwan: falling, but the fall predates the Fire Horse

Taiwan is the one falling series, and the one place the fall clearly predates the Fire Horse. Monthly registrations have declined year on year for 29 consecutive months as of May 2026^[12], and 2025 closed at a record-low 107,812 births (fertility rate 0.695), down from 134,856 in 2024^[14] — the collapse was well underway before the Fire Horse year began. The 2026 months so far: January 8,723; February 6,523, an all-time monthly low^[11]; March 8,798; April 8,144; May 6,832^[12]. Cumulative January–May: 39,020 births against 46,407 in the same months of 2025^[13], down 15.9 percent. One reading note: February 2025's base (10,407) ran well above its adjacent months, so February 2026's 37 percent drop overstates the underlying trend.

Whether any Fire Horse avoidance is layered onto Taiwan's structural decline cannot be separated in the monthly data, but the context cuts against a large zodiac effect. Taiwan's official calendar-year series shows no dip in 1966 — 415,108 births, up from 406,604 in 1965, with the decline arriving in 1967 (374,282), a pattern consistent with lunar-year timing but never, to our knowledge, formally analyzed^[15]. Taiwan's well-documented zodiac effects run through other animals: the 2010 Tiger year dipped to 166,886 births and the 2012 Dragon year spiked to 229,481^[15]. Taiwan's occurrence-basis annual file from the Ministry of the Interior, which we retrieved directly, confirms the scale of the 2025 fall: 105,676 births by occurrence, from 134,769 in 2024^[10].

The monthly numbers

The full dataset — including Japan 1960–1970 and 1905–1907, fertility rates, annual totals, the 2025 monthly baselines, and Taiwan's historical zodiac-year series — is in the downloadable CSV, one sourced value per row.

What to watch next

Three milestones will settle the question. First, Japan's monthly releases for November and December 2026, which are published about two months after the reference month, carry the first births conceived after the lunisolar year began — the cleanest test of deliberate avoidance. Second, the annual 2026 totals: on the ministries' established schedules, the 2025 equivalents were released on February 26, 2026 (Japan, preliminary), February 25, 2026 (South Korea, preliminary), and January 10, 2026 (Taiwan), so the 2026 verdicts should land in the first two months of 2027. Third, South Korea's 2026 sex ratio at birth, the channel where Korea's horse-year belief showed up in 1990^[20]. China, where the National Bureau of Statistics publishes births annually rather than monthly, contributes its first Fire Horse datum on the same early-2027 timetable. This page will be updated at each of those points.

Methodology

Data sources & access dates

ChineseZodiac.com (2026). "The Fire Horse Birth-Rate Test." https://chinesezodiac.com/studies/fire-horse-birth-rates. Underlying data: Japan Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare; Statistics Korea; Taiwan Ministry of the Interior.

<a href="https://chinesezodiac.com/studies/fire-horse-birth-rates">The Fire Horse Birth-Rate Test</a> — ChineseZodiac.com (2026), compiled from Japan Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare; Statistics Korea; Taiwan Ministry of the Interior.

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