The Future I Saw: The Manga Prediction That's Got Everyone Talking

There’s something enchanting yet unsettling about the unseen. We chase prophecies as if they hold the celestial key to unravel our fate. Tea leaf readings attempt to foreshadow our futures, the stars miles away predict your love life, and dreams hold the potential to come true.

Yet more often than not, these visions are nothing but glittering coincidences, haunting reminders of how eager we are to insert meaning into randomness.

Turn back the clock to the early 2000s, when an obscure prophecy foresaw the world’s collapse in 2012. Hollywood, not to be outdone, released the disaster film 2012, dramatising this apocalyptic judgment. Yet, despite the cinematic spectacle, calamity never came. The world trudged on.

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Fast forward to 2020 and the arrival of the pandemic: the resurgence of something eerie, a dusty tome from the “internet of things” forecasting the course of a global viral scourge. For some, it felt like a proof that even centuries-old manuscripts could foresee modern calamity. In truth, it was yet another sensational coincidence, repackaged to suit a moment of global panic.

But it is the most recent prophecy—spun from the pages of a Japanese manga—that has permeated social feeds, shrines of anxiety, and the collective imagination in uncomfortably vivid ways all about to happen two days from now. July 5, 2025. The frenzy around the prediction 4 years since the book came out has resulted in tourists considering exit from Japan.

What does the book predict about July 5 in Japan?

In 2021, Japanese manga artist and author Ryo Tatsuki, who has adopted the enigmatic pseudonym New Baba Vanga's 1991 book, The Future I Saw, re-released. Through the gentle brushstrokes of manga artistry, she described a recurring dream of a colossal earthquake hitting Japan on July 5, 2025, triggered by a tectonic rupture along the seabed between Japan and the Philippines. She foretold that this wave would dwarf even the devastating disaster of 2011 as it would be thrice the magnitude.

But why has the book been so controversial? The Future I Saw is a visual account of the dreams of the manga artist according to her diary that was first published in 1991 and gained attention after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami when it was found that the cover of the book had apparently predicted a disaster occurring in March 2011.

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In 2020, the manga attracted again even after the original publisher Asahi Sonorama was defunct and the book itself had gone out of print causing prices of copies to increase.

But that's not all. In 2021 the reprint capitalising off this revived popularity warned of a "real disaster" in July 2025, causing a minor case of mass hysteria in 2025 when summer trips to Japan from East Asia decreased considerably and several airlines cancelled flights to Japan, apparently out of travelers' concerns that the predictions would come true.

So is there any truth to the prediction?

As July 5 has approached, the creep of fear has turned into a wave of its own. Thousands of videos have flooded East Asian social media, particularly in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and South Korea, recasting Tatsuki’s artwork as a sinister forecast.

Voices on X (formerly Twitter) began to juxtapose her prediction with credible geological anxieties—chiefly, the dreaded Nankai Trough megaquake, an unthinkably powerful tremor that haunts Japanese scientific discourse.

Concurrently, a minor swarm of over 330 earthquakes rattled the Tokara Islands south of Kyushu, and Mount Shinmoe erupted in winter. The mosaic of signs? Enough to unlock a collective pang of déjà-vu among netizens. Even if only by accident, the timing of these events wrapped Tatsuki’s reverie in disturbing plausibility.

Tatsuki herself aggravates these currents with her mysterious credentials, but she also offers a soothing balm: a frank request that her vision be taken as fiction, albeit eerie fiction, and nothing more. She urges the public to keep their eyes on expert voices—not manga panels.

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However, that plea hasn't quite stemmed the tide. For tourists, the prophecy’s power is tangible. Airlines, such as Greater Bay Airlines, have announced flight reductions. Booking platforms for destinations like Japan have seen a 30 per cent decline, particularly for travellers from Hong Kong, China, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Hit worst of all? Southwest Japan’s Tottori region. According to local tourism offices, vacation bookings from Hong Kong plummeted nearly 50 per cent in May, a drop attributed almost entirely to tsunami fears.

Yet seismologists from the calm corridors of Japan’s Geological Society to the rigor of Tokyo University’s disaster science department maintain steadfast: earthquakes cannot be predicted with precision. An eruption here, a tremor there. Coincidence, they say. Science, after all, is not prophecy.

But Why Do We Believe In Prophecies?

Somewhere between folklore and fear lies our hunger for pattern. We yearn for control in a chaotic world. That’s why every tremor becomes an omen, every dream a prophecy.

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In the mythology of ancient cultures, soothsayers and nets of fate were real. Their prophecies influenced kings, wars, and the movement of whole societies. Today, in a world hyper-connected through digital platforms, a manga’s reverie can travel faster than any tsunami. Yet that doesn’t make it real.

The allure of prophecy lies not in accuracy but in its resonance, echoing our deepest, collective anxieties about nature’s invisible power. When a dream is painted in breathtaking strokes and corroborated, even tenuously, by natural events, our imagination blurs the line between fiction and fate.

Yet there is something instructive in the cultural moment itself: it’s a mirror held up to our collective psyche. We fear what we don’t understand. We spin narratives out of seismic whispers. We want a story, any story, to contain terror, to make it digestible.

Maybe the greatest prophecy is this: humanity’s unending need for meaning. Whether from an ancient manuscript, a haiku, or a manga panel, we will weave myths to explain the unexplainable—and, in doing so, face the ultimate truth: we cannot predict the future. We prepare for it.

So what are we to make of Tatsuki’s tsunami? Coincidence? Mythical wisdom? A cautionary tale of our age?