As powerful waves surged across the vast Pacific on Wednesday, people around the world remained glued to their phones, tracking the tsunami’s fast progress.
But in China, more than a million people were searching for an unusual term: “Prophecy.”
That’s because, for some, the natural disaster had seemingly been foretold four years earlier, in a Japanese manga comic book.
Published by manga artist Ryo Tatsuki in 1999, “The Future I Saw” warned of a major disaster in March 2011, a date which turned out to coincide with the cataclysmic quake that struck Japan’s northern Tohoku region that month.
Her “complete version” released in 2021 claimed that the next big earthquake would hit in July 2025 sparking a flurry of viral internet memes and debates across much of Asia in recent months as that date neared.
In China, a search term related to Tatsuki’s so-called “prophecy” gained more than 1.1 million views on the video app Douyin in the immediate aftermath of Wednesday’s Pacific tsunami.
“Will Ryo Tatsuki’s prediction of a major disaster in July come true?” ran the headline of a Wednesday article in a Hong Kong newspaper.
The manga has had an avid following since its publication in 2021. But it became a cultural phenomenon throughout much of Asia earlier this year as fans anticipated the coming of the author’s apparent prediction, spooking travelers so much that many even canceled summer trips to Japan.
Among tourists, some are relieved and ready to return after Wednesday’s events caused minimal damage. But others remain on edge, resolved to stay away for now.
“I’m getting goosebumps!” wrote one Japanese user on X following the massive 8.8 quake.
Chinese traveler Andrea Wang, 25, had canceled an April trip to Japan, saying the manga made her “concerned about the risk to my life.” Though the tsunami has now passed, she still doesn’t plan to travel to Japan for the rest of 2025, she told CNN on Friday.
It is impossible to accurately project in advance when an earthquake might strike, and seismologists have strongly cautioned against believing the rising number of so-called predictions. Even Tatsuki herself urged people not to be “overly swayed” by her dreams, in an interview with Japanese media in May.
But the prevalence of the debate proves the manga’s tight grip on the popular imagination – amplified by both soothsayers across Asia and social media – especially in seismically active Japan, where the constant threat of an earthquake or tsunami looms large in the popular imagination.
Many still bear the scars of the 2011 Tohoku disaster, when an earthquake triggered devastating tsunami waves that caused the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. The disaster left more than 22,000 dead or missing – and has since become embedded in the national psyche, with Japanese toddlers doing earthquake drills from the time they can walk, and the government regularly warning of an impending, once-in-a-century earthquake.
Tatsuki’s manga depicts a cartoon version of herself gleaning visions from her slumbers, some of which turn out to bear close resemblance to real-life events. Some fans believe she predicted the deaths of Princess Diana and Freddie Mercury, though skeptics say her visions are too vague to be taken seriously.
It was the 2011 quake that boosted belief in Tatsuki’s supposed prescience. Her 1999 manga “The Future I Saw” has the words “massive disaster in March, 2011” on the cover – leading many to believe that she predicted the 9.0 magnitude earthquake more than a decade before it hit Tohoku.
In her 2021 follow-up, Tatsuki warned that an earthquake in the Philippine Sea on July 5 this year would cause tsunami waves three times as tall as those from the Tohoku earthquake – leading many to fear disaster sometime last month.
In the end, Wednesday’s quake struck thousands of kilometers from the predicted epicenter, and the highest waves recorded in Japan measured only 4.3 feet – far below the 30-foot waves seen in 2011.
But many travelers, like Wang, decided not to take the chance and canceled their trips to Japan in the last few months, pointing to similar warnings from psychics in Japan and Hong Kong.
CN Yuen, managing director of Hong Kong-based travel agency WWPKG, said the number of bookings for Japan tours fell about 70% in June and July, compared with the same time last year.
Oscar Chu, a 36-year-old traveler from Hong Kong, also decided not to go earlier this summer, despite usually visiting Japan multiple times a year. “I wouldn’t say I was 100% certain (about the prediction), but I wouldn’t write off the possibility,” he told CNN on Friday.
When July 5 passed with no incident, some of his friends booked flights to Japan the very next day, he said.
He’ll head there himself in a few weeks, having coincidentally bought tickets on Wednesday morning – just before receiving news of the tsunami. But he still plans to go; “You can’t avoid going for a lifetime,” he said.
Not everybody is reassured, however. Some of Chu’s friends, who love visiting Japan as much as he does, are taking precautions like avoiding coastal areas or skipping the beach.
They’re not the only ones wary of a “big one” on the horizon. Wednesday’s tsunami highlighted the vulnerability for millions living on coastlines all around the Pacific, where the seismically active “Ring of Fire” has produced many of the world’s strongest earthquake.
Fears in Japan have been mounting since the government’s recent warnings that a massive quake could hit the southern Nankai Trough within the next 30 years – though the science remains disputed.
The Nankai Trough is a 700-kilometer-long (435-mile) subduction zone, where one tectonic plate slips beneath another. Along this fault, severe earthquakes have been recorded every 100 to 200 years, according to the Japanese government’s Earthquake Research Committee.
The last such quakes took place in 1944 and 1946, killing at least 2,500 people and destroying tens of thousands of homes.
The Japanese government has repeatedly warned there is a 70-80% chance that Japan will be rocked by another Nankai Trough earthquake within 30 years – leading many scientists to questioning the accuracy of that probability.
Regardless of the prediction’s reliability, the nation is on high alert and kicks into gear whenever a quake hits. This highly-effective advanced warning system was on full display this week, when local authorities issued evacuations warnings, urging more than two million residents in high risk areas along the coastline to seek higher ground.
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When a magnitude 7.1 quake hit southern Japan last August, authorities were similarly quick to respond, slowing trains and warning of potential tsunamis – though in the end there was no major damage.
Whether or not Wednesday’s quake was the one envisioned in Tatsuki’s manga, public vigilance against potential disaster will likely linger in Japan long after this week’s waves recede.
“It is because of (Tatsuki’s) warning that more people started to pay attention to earthquake risks in advance, improve disaster prevention awareness, and also prompted everyone to learn relevant knowledge and prepare emergency supplies,” a user wrote on the Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote.
“People’s alertness has increased, which in itself is of great significance.”
