If it's Golden Week, it must be time to dust off those travel statistics again. Every year, government and tourist-industry number-crunchers tell us the score on the number of Japanese traveling abroad in the madcap first week of May, as opposed to those who travel inside Japan or, most sensibly of all, stay home and put their feet up.

Some years, more people opt to go overseas, despite the ultra-double-peak airfares and the crush at the airports; some years (surprise!) fewer do. The crests and dips in the statistics are generally taken as indicators of how the economy is doing. More people are traveling? Things must be looking up. Not so many overseas bookings this year? Things must be grim after all.

This year, the statisticians tell us, numbers will be up, though overall, more middle-aged and elderly people are going and comparatively fewer young ones. That little blip already has industry analysts racking their brains for explanations. Our favorite comes from one tourist-company executive who was quoted as surmising last week that more young people are staying home these days because a) their cell-phone bills are so high they can't afford to travel, and b) they can buy their favorite designer brands in Japan more easily than they can abroad. That man is an original thinker: Note that he didn't so much as mention the traditional industry bugaboo of recession. According to this scenario, the economy is doing just fine: Young Japanese are so busy spending they don't have time to travel.

Of course, he also didn't mention the possibility that the number of elderly travelers might be up because there are more elderly people in Japan than there used to be, and that the reverse holds true for the youth group. (It's called the graying society.) He also didn't mention that an astounding one-fifth to one-quarter of Japanese in their 20s still do travel abroad annually.

The fact remains that -- whether the numbers are up a bit or down a bit from one season to the next or for this demographic group or that -- nearly 20 million Japanese set off to see the rest of the planet each year, and the rest of the planet knows this. Most of it is waiting to welcome them, and their yen, with open arms. Throughout the entire "lost decade" of the '90s -- postbubble recession, protracted slump and all -- this broad statistic held steady. We think it is time to shelve the idea of an inverse ratio between travel and hard times. Times just haven't gotten that hard here yet.

The more interesting question is why people go at all. Desperate optimism is the answer. People are propelled abroad by twin forces, one pushing and one pulling. From behind, they are driven by the desire to get as far away as possible from what Philip Larkin called "the toad, work" and other routine burdens. From afar, they are drawn by the prospect of immersion in something completely different, perhaps even life-changing: the cities, mountains, palaces and countless weird places of pilgrimage they know from tourist brochures or their own dreams. Given the means, why not? Sometimes such a journey, or a slice of it, can sustain a lucky traveler through the next whole year of drudgery.

The only caveat would be: Don't expect magic every time. The truth is that the kind of displacement we really need is mental, not physical -- time, not distance. Larkin said this best, too: "To put one brick upon another,/ Add a third, and then a fourth,/ Leaves no time to wonder whether/ What you do has any worth." Travel abroad, with its organizational and physical stresses, can leave less time for that kind of necessary meditation than simply staying peacefully in your own house and neighborhood.

Particularly if you only go for a week. By the time you get to that exotic beach or city, you will need a couple of days just to get over Narita, the crowded plane, the lost luggage and the jet lag. Then you'll need a couple more to prepare mentally for the trip back and another for the trip itself. Then more jet lag. If the whole family goes, just double the stress quotient and cancel the "down time" altogether. No wonder Golden Week looks a little tarnished sometimes.

Here's an idea: Abolish Golden Week. Separate and scatter the national holidays that clumped together to form the monster in the first place. Encourage people to take all their regular vacation time instead of substituting Golden Week for part of it, as they do now. Then let them go whenever they want, wherever they want, for two or three weeks -- at low-season prices, from quiet airports, in modestly occupied planes. The travel industry could regroup around a whole new motto: Travel isn't just for lemmings anymore.