Japan. July tsunami, 2011 earthquake, Covid... the disturbing predictions of a manga author

Born in 1954 and living in the Yokohama region, Ryô Tatsuki is a Japanese manga author (or mangaka) who became famous in 2011. Indeed, in one of her works published in 1999, Watashi ga mita mirai ( My visions of the future , published in France by Black Box éditions ), an anthology where the author compiled her premonitory dreams, she drew a page indicating "a great disaster in March 2011". Like the earthquake of March 11, 2011 in Tôhoku which caused nearly 20,000 deaths.

Since then, Ryô Tatsuki's manga, published since the 1970s, have been dissected like the texts of Nostradamus. Throughout her career, the author has depicted several disturbing dreams, whether it be the death of Freddie Mercury, the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan, or that a terrible disease would strike the world in 2020 .

With the help of success (and also to counter several attempts to usurp her name), Ryô Tatsuki published a new version of her manga in 2021. In the preface, compiled by the site Unseen Japan , she denies having any gift of premonition: "I think everyone has these kinds of dreams, but the majority forget them because they don't write them down like me." This didn't stop the mangaka from adding new predictions, notably about a tsunami hitting Japan in July 2025...

This is where the comparison with reality ends: Ryô Tatsuki had predicted the event for July 5 at the level of the Philippine Sea, while tsunami warnings were issued on Wednesday July 30 after an earthquake off the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka .

Estimating whether the Pacific region will be affected by earthquakes or tsunamis is almost trivial: there are many tectonic plates, and Japan lies at the intersection of four of them. The question is when these natural phenomena will occur, and that's something no one can say.

But Ryô Tatsuki's "prediction" had real consequences for Japan: a drop in tourist numbers, particularly from Southeast Asia. According to the business media Bloomberg , flight bookings for summer 2025 from Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong fell by 50% compared to 2024, with a drop of up to 83% for the period from late June to early July—the period of the famous prophecy. And the flights were quite empty.

More than the veracity of her dreams, Ryô Tatsuki believed that her work opened the debate on the need to prepare for natural disasters. As she recently stated in an interview with the Japanese daily Mainichi (and reported by Le Monde ): "The interpretation of dreams is a matter of free will, but it is important to act appropriately without being influenced and to listen to the opinions of experts." If she herself says so...