Before dividing the day into twenty-four hours, the people of East Asia split it into twelve segments. These were called the “twelve double-hours,” or shichen, and one of them equals about two of our modern hours. Each was given, in turn, the name of one of the twelve zodiac animals familiar from the year-signs. It was a more unhurried sense of time, one that called the hours not by numbers but by the names of animals.
The structure runs like this. The day begins with the “rat hour,” which holds the middle of the night — roughly from eleven at night to one in the morning — then flows on through the ox hour, the tiger hour, the rabbit hour, and so on to the last, the pig hour. The peak of midday, noon, falls in the “horse hour”; in many East Asian languages the character for the horse hour is the very word for noon. So twelve animals each guarded a two-hour slice of the day.
These twelve hours soaked into daily life. The opening and closing of city gates, and the marking of time by bell and drum, were set to the double-hours; and, above all, the “hour of birth” so important in saju is reckoned by exactly these twelve. Saju raises the year, month, day and hour of birth into four pillars, and that last pillar, the “hour pillar,” is set by which double-hour you were born in. So two people born on the same day, but in different double-hours, have charts of different grain — if the year-sign is the animal of your year, the birth hour adds one more, the animal of your time of day.
There is, however, something to state honestly. The twelve hours were not, at root, a divination claiming causes, but a “language of time” that split the day by leaning on the flow of nature. It is said the ancients paired each double-hour with the time they thought that animal most lively — placing the diligent rat, for instance, in the quiet depth of the night. This is less a scientific cause than a fond imagining that remembered the day’s rhythm through the figures of animals. It is also a culture shared across several countries of East Asia.
So the twelve hours are less a verdict that “the time I was born sets my fortune” and more a window into how the East felt the flow of a day. That unhurried way of calling the hours by animal names, instead of by a dial of numbers, can even let us catch our breath amid a busy today. As always in FortuneLeaf, this is offered not as a fixed fate but as one small pleasure of savouring a day more deeply.