Southeast Asia looks up a Korean trip in December. It stops looking in June

Last week we tried to put what Southeast Asia reads about Seoul next to where foreign visitors actually walk, and could not: the public admissions table can only be asked about five of Seoul’s districts. The two rulers were too far apart.

There is something in between. Someone who opens the article on Incheon airport, or the Seoul subway, or Jeju, is closer to a plane ticket than someone who opens an actor’s page. So we counted those, month by month, in the four Southeast Asian Wikipedias — and set them beside the passengers who actually flew.

The obvious reading is the weak one

Looking peaks in December. Flying peaks in January. One month apart, in the order you would expect, and it is tempting to say the first produces the second.

We cannot say that. We never see a single reader board a single plane. A one-month gap can be coincidence, and it can equally be two different things each following their own calendar — school holidays on one side, airline scheduling on the other.

The steadier signal sits at the other end of the year. Both fall to their lowest point in the same month: June. Reading swings 1.61× across the year; flying, 1.38×. The quiet month is where the two rulers agree without any story needing to be told about cause.

What the numbers are not

The air table separates Japan and China and puts every other Asian country into a single row. Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia sit inside that row alongside India and Central Asia and cannot be told apart. This is not a Southeast Asia line, and no figure here says how many people flew in from any one country.

We are not publishing a correlation coefficient. Over twenty-three months, a shared season alone will produce a large one, and it would look far more certain than the evidence is. The peak months and the distance between them are on the table above; the reader can see the size of the claim.

Folding twenty-three months into twelve leaves two years behind most rows and one behind July. A monthly average here rests on two readings.

And looking is not going. Some of these reads are homework, some are idle curiosity, and some never become a trip. What the data can show is when the looking happens — and that it stops happening in June.