Korean Saju Calculator — Four Pillars of Destiny

What is Korean Saju (사주팔자)?

Saju means "four pillars" and palja means "eight characters". In the Korean tradition — shared with the Chinese BaZi and Japanese Shichū suimei — the year, month, day and hour of your birth are each written as two characters from the sexagenary (60-term) cycle: a Heavenly Stem (天干, one of 10) on top and an Earthly Branch (地支, one of 12, the zodiac animals) underneath. Four pillars × two characters = eight characters.

Every character belongs to one of the Five Elements — Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water — and is either yin or yang. The stem of your day pillar is the Day Master, the character that stands for you. Every other character is read by its relationship to the Day Master, giving the Ten Gods (십성): siblings and rivals, talents and output, wealth, career and authority, learning and support. Koreans traditionally visit a saju reader before New Year, weddings or big moves, and today saju cafés and apps make it a popular pastime.

How this calculator works

Solar terms, not New Year's Day. The Saju year begins at Ipchun (Start of Spring, about February 4) and each month begins at its solar term. This page computes those moments to the minute with the open-source lunar-javascript astronomical calendar — the same engine as our Korean Saju page, so both give identical pillars.

Births anywhere in the world. You enter the clock time where you were born. The page looks up the official UTC offset for that city on that exact date with your browser's IANA time-zone database (Intl.DateTimeFormat), so historical daylight saving time is handled. For Korean cities it uses the Korean record of DST and the 1954–1961 UTC+8:30 standard time. The year and month pillars depend on the exact moment of the solar term (an instant, the same everywhere); the day and hour pillars use local solar time — Universal Time plus 4 minutes per degree of longitude — because the traditional hours follow the sun where you were born.

Example: 1990-07-04 14:00 in New York is UTC−4 (EDT), i.e. 18:00 UTC, which is 03:00 on July 5 in Korea. New York's longitude is 74.0°W, so local solar time is 18:00 − 4 h 56 min ≈ 13:04 (13:03:59) on July 4. The day pillar is therefore taken from July 4, not the Korean date of July 5, and 13:04 falls in the Goat hour (未, 13:00–15:00).

Strength, useful element and luck cycles

Day-master strength is a simplified score that weights each position (the month branch counts most). The "useful elements" are suggestions for balance, not a formal yongsin, which differs between schools. Ten-year luck cycles (daeun) run forward or backward depending on your sex and the yin/yang of your birth year, starting at an age set by the distance to the nearest solar term (3 days = 1 year).

Frequently asked questions

What is Korean Saju?

Saju (사주, "four pillars") is the Korean form of the East Asian Four Pillars of Destiny. The year, month, day and hour of birth are each written as a Heavenly Stem and an Earthly Branch, giving eight characters (palja). Reading how their Five Elements balance and interact is a long-standing Korean tradition, enjoyed today mostly as entertainment and self-reflection.

I was born outside Korea. How is my birth time converted?

Your local clock time is converted to Universal Time using the IANA time-zone history for your city, including daylight saving time in force on that date. The year and month pillars use the exact solar-term moment, and the day and hour pillars use local solar time at your birthplace's longitude, which is the traditional rule.

Why does my Saju year start in February, not January?

Saju follows the 24 solar terms, so the year changes at Ipchun (Start of Spring, around February 4) and each month changes at its solar term (around the 4th–8th of each month). If you were born near one of those dates, the exact birth time matters.