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

The month they agree on is the quiet one

Looking peaks in December and flying peaks in January — one month apart. That gap is the easy thing to notice and the weakest thing here. The steadier signal is at the other end: both sides fall to their lowest point in June. Reading swings by 1.61× across the year, flying by 1.38×.

Twelve months, both rulers

Reading is reads per million reads of that Wikipedia, summed across 4 articles and 4 editions. Flying is passengers on the Asia routes. Window — 2024-08 through 2026-06, 23 months.

⚠ Twenty-three months folded into twelve leaves two years for most months and one for the rest. A "monthly average" here rests on two readings, sometimes one. Only one year of July sits in this window.

Before we folded it: every month we measured

The table above folds 23 months into twelve. This is the unfolded run, so you can see what the folding smoothed away — including that the two peaks sit one month apart rather than on top of each other.

Where a month has a reading figure but no passenger figure we say so rather than writing a zero.

Which articles, and which we left out

We used the 4 travel articles that exist in all 4 editions: Incheon International Airport, Seoul Metropolitan Subway, Korean cuisine, Jeju Island. The panel started at 10. An article missing from one edition cannot stand for the region, so it is out of the sum rather than counted as a zero there.

What this page cannot tell you

Looking is not going. Some of these reads are homework, some are curiosity, and some never become a trip. What this can show is when the looking happens.

The air table puts Japan and China in their own rows and every other Asian country into one. Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia sit inside that single row alongside India and Central Asia, and cannot be told apart. It is not a Southeast Asia line.

We are not publishing a correlation. Over twenty-three months a correlation can be produced by a single shared season, and it would look more certain than it is. We name the peak month on each side and let the reader see the distance.

A peak in one month and a peak in the next does not mean the first caused the second. We cannot see any individual reader board any plane. The steadier signal here is not the peak at all — it is that both sides fall to their lowest point in the same month.

Opening an encyclopaedia article about a visa rule or an airport is not the same as boarding a plane. Some of these reads are homework, some are curiosity, and some never become a trip. What this can show is when the looking happens.

Looking — Wikimedia Pageviews API, human traffic only; titles resolved via Wikipedia langlinks. Flying — KOSIS, international air routes by region, Korea Airports Corporation.