In a country where seismic tremors occur every other week and disaster preparedness is woven into the cultural fabric, it takes something extraordinary to unsettle the rhythms of Japan’s travel industry. That “something”, it turns out, is a manga, which predicts a major natural disaster in July 2025, based on the author’s dream.
The revival of Japanese manga comic, Watashi ga Mita Mirai (The Future I Saw), by Ryo Tatsuki, has induced a wave of anxiety amongst travel firms and airlines who report less demand from worried Hong Kongers, by predicting a major earthquake in 2025.
In the manga, she explains how the dreams have often had connections to real-life incidents in the future and one particularly unsettling dream involved a major tsunami. The complete version of the comic, “Watashi ga Mita Mirai Kanzenban” (The Future I Saw: The Complete Edition), republished in 2021, include prophecy to another grave prediction.
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In 2024, people from Hong Kong made nearly 2.7 million trips to Japan, as per AFP. But now, the resurfaced rumours have ignited fear in Japan’s travel agencies and airlines, with many bracing for a significant drop in demand.
“The earthquake prophecy has caused a big shift in our customers’ preferences,” Frankie Chow, head of Hong Kong travel agency CLS Holiday, told AFP. “I’ve never experienced this before,” he added.
Last month, Japan’s Cabinet Office posted on the social media platform X: “Predicting earthquakes by date, time and place is not possible based on current scientific knowledge.”
A Cabinet Office official told AFP that the post was part of its regular public information efforts about earthquakes.
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A YouTube video by local media outlet HK01, featuring a feng shui master urging viewers not to travel to Japan, has been viewed over 100,000 times.
Don Hon, a 32-year-old social worker, told AFP he doesn’t fully believe the online claims but has still been affected by them.
“I’ll just take it as a precaution and won’t make any specific plans to travel to Japan,” he said.
In 2011, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake triggered a tsunami that left 18,500 people dead or missing and led to the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, an event eerily similar to what was depicted in Tatsuki’s manga. Following the disaster, the artist’s work gained widespread attention, and her so-called prophetic dreams began drawing a large following.
(With inputs from AFP and Japan Today)
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