Latest news with #WatashigaMitaMirai
The Mainichi
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Mainichi
Japan gov't urges public to heed science as HK visitors cancel trips amid disaster rumor
TOKYO -- An unsubstantiated rumor spreading in Hong Kong that a major disaster will strike Japan in July was discussed June 4 during the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee meeting. The rumor has already caused issues such as flight reductions by airlines, prompting the Japanese government to urge travelers to "rely on scientific information from public agencies when making travel decisions." The rumor is said to be partly based on the content from the Japanese manga "Watashi ga Mita Mirai" (The future I saw), originally published in 1999, which has been circulating among social media users in Hong Kong since earlier this year. Some Hong Kong airlines have reportedly reduced or suspended regular flights to Japan since May. Takanori Suzuki, the vice commissioner of the Japan Tourism Agency who responded to questions during the committee meeting, dismissed the rumor, saying, "The Cabinet Office and the Japan Meteorological Agency say predicting the specific date, time and location (of earthquakes) is difficult based on current scientific knowledge." He called on the public not to be misled by scientifically groundless claims. The number of tourists from Hong Kong to Japan reached a record high of about 260,000 people in April, but the number of visitors is expected to decline in May and June, during the off season. The Japanese government, promoting inbound tourism, is closely monitoring the number of visitors from Hong Kong and other places, as well as trip cancellations, for the month of July.
Indian Express
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
How a Manga prophecy has stirred panic among travel firms, airlines in Japan
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. 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. 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)
Tokyo Weekender
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Tokyo Weekender
‘Prophetic Manga' Predicts a Great Cataclysm Will Hit Japan in July 2025
Retired comic artist Ryo Tatsuki claims that she has been having prophetic dreams for close to 50 years now. In the early 1980s, she started recording her visions and their dates in a proper dream journal, and in 1999, she released a manga, Watashi ga Mita Mirai (The Future That I Saw) based on some of the entries in it. Legend goes that one day before the deadline, the author received a message in her dream that she then added to the cover. It read: 'March 2011, Great Disaster.' Some people interpret it today as a prediction of the massive earthquake and tsunami that hit the Tohoku region on March 11, 2011, known as 3.11. Now, though, Tatsuki is saying that Japan will experience an even bigger disaster in July 2025. List of Contents: A Claimed Career of Clairvoyance From 3.11 to 7.2025 Airlines Among the First Victims of the 'July Cataclysm' Prediction Fault Lines Related Posts A Claimed Career of Clairvoyance According to a 2021 complete edition release of Watashi ga Mita Mirai, among the many things Tatsuki predicted was the passing of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury 15 years before it happened, and the death of Princess Diana five years before the tragic events in Paris in 1997. Tatsuki seems to dream about death a lot. In one case, she was in some kind of cave with a girl she didn't know, only to later discover it was a WW2-era air-raid shelter at an unidentified park in Yokohama. Later, she heard on the news that a chopped-up body wearing the same clothes she saw in the dream was found in the man-made 'cave.' Other times, death was even more veiled, like in the dream where she visited her family home in the countryside and came to a crossroad where instead of grapes, she saw a field of loquats (symbols of misfortune, according to the author). Tatsuki interprets this as premonitions about her uncle's later death. Even when she isn't foreseeing death, Tatsuki rarely foretells anything good, including the time she reportedly predicted her friend being dumped with the phrase: 'I don't dislike you, but I don't love you.' The tsunami-wreaked devastation in Tohoku after the 2011 earthquake. From 3.11 to 7.2025 After the tragic events of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that resulted in over 20,000 deaths, Watashi ga Mita Mirai was rediscovered and quickly became known as the 'phantom prophetic manga.' It was out of print at the time so copies of it started being sold for over ¥100,000 at auction sites. A re-release was all but guaranteed, and it was eventually slated for 2021. But just like in 1999, shortly before the deadline,Tatsuki received another premonition, this one telling her that the 'real disaster' will befall Japan in July 2025. In the complete edition, the author clarifies that a giant tsunami dream she's been having since 1981 was not connected to the March 2011 Great Disaster premonition as many people thought throughout the years. Tatsuki explains that, in her dreams, it was summer since she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, while 3.11 happened in winter. Plus, the destructive wave she saw was three times larger than the one that hit Tohoku, where the tsunami reached over 40 meters in height. The 2021 dream predicting a July 2025 cataclysm offered further details on the origins of the tsunami, which will apparently be the result of a massive explosion like a volcano or a bomb going off between Japan and the Philippines. The seabed will be pushed up and create new land masses while giant waves will consume a third to a quarter of Japan facing the Pacific Ocean. Airlines Among the First Victims of the 'July Cataclysm' Watashi ga Mita Mirai became a hit in China, where fans are taking the 7.2025 prediction so seriously, they've canceled a bunch of flights to Japan around that time. Greater Bay Airlines actually had to cut summer flights from Hong Kong to Japan by three to four a week amid plummeting demand. Adding to the fear is a prominent Hong Kong feng shui master who foretold increased earthquake risks for Japan from June to August of 2025. All in all, airline bookings from Hong Kong fell by 30% this year , especially to Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture (the city nearest to the 3.11 quake) and Tokushima Prefecture on the island of Shikoku, which would be one of the places hit first by a tsunami coming from the south. But it won't be. Prediction Fault Lines 'Predicting' the death of Freddie Mercury could have been eerie if Tatsuki also put a date on it. Dreaming of Mercury's death 15 years before it happened means less than nothing especially for a person who, even before he first started exhibiting symptoms of HIV and AIDS, embodied the hard-partying, devil-may-care nature of rock and roll. It wasn't weird for people to assume that, out of all the Queen members, Freddie would be the first to go someday. At least in her dream, Tatsuki actually saw a news bulletin saying 'Freddie Mercury has died.' Her dream of Princess Diana involved simply seeing her picture on the news under the name 'Dianna.' As for the park killing, the story in the manga apparently changed a few details 'out of respect for the victim,' so it is difficult to verify it, especially given the disturbingly high number of murders in Japan where the victim was dismembered. Finally, getting 'death' from loquats feels like something that doesn't deserve commentary, but let's try it anyway. Throughout the complete edition of Watashi ga Mita Mirai, Tatsuki is constantly hedging her predictions by saying that a lot of her dreams are symbolic, like the one telling her she will die in 2000, or the one about the metaphorical eruption of Mount Fuji. But she apparently can't tell which visions are literal and which aren't, so how are we to know that the 'July Cataclysm' won't be the latter? She also uses words like 'maybe,' 'perhaps,' and 'I don't know, though' a lot. For someone who also claims to have been the daughter of the Indian spiritual leader Sathya Sai Baba in a previous life (Tatsuki is into spiritualism), she really should be more confident in her predictive powers. Or not, since the other dates on the cover of her manga ranging from 1991 to 1999 don't seem to correspond to any major disasters. People have tried to link them to all sorts of events, including the COVID pandemic of all things, but it's all too vague and desperate to be taken seriously. So, is the July 2025 prediction made up? Nobody knows. Plus, why would anyone do that? The complete edition release of Watashi ga Mita Mirai sold over 560,000 copies . For legal reasons, the previous two sentences are completely unrelated. Related Posts Manga Manners: How Sailor Moon and Eren Yaeger Are Teaching Japanese Etiquette in JR Stations From Nana to Paradise Kiss: Ai Yazawa's Iconic Manga Are Coming to Uniqlo The Lesbian Romance That Inspired a String of Volcano Suicides
Japan Today
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Today
Manga predicting major disaster in July affecting summer tourism numbers
By SoraNews24 In July 1999, manga author Ryo Tatsuki published "Watashi ga Mita Mirai" (The Future I Saw) which was based on her own dream journal she had been keeping for years. 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 book received little mainstream attention until sometime after the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11, 2011. The story of "Watashi ga Mita Mirai" itself doesn't specifically mention the date or location of its envisioned major tsunami, but on the cover, a flurry of pages from her dream journal are illustrated, with one reading 'A Big Disaster on March 2011.' ▼ The date can be seen on the third page from the right. Image: SoraNews24 That was enough to lend credit to Tatsuki's prophetic dreams and the manga's popularity spread like wildfire, with it being featured on every major television network. Some people also took advantage of Tatsuki's reclusive nature by impersonating her online and spreading their own predictions. This led to her releasing "Watashi ga Mita Mirai Kanzenban" (The Future I Saw: The Complete Edition) in 2021, which in addition to the original story, included addendums that clarified the reference to March 2011 and gave another grave prediction. In the book, Tatsuki explains that she originally wasn't sure if there was a connection between the date and the tsunami in the story, but she knew that was an important date so she included it on the cover. She also says that the next major disaster will take place on July 5, 2025. It's a rather large leap of faith to believe her dreams are prophetic rather than coincidental imagination, but it's a leap that some are willing to take as the effect of "Watashi ga Mita Mirai" can be seen in tourism forecasts this summer. In Hong Kong, where the book became rather popular, Greater Bay Airlines has announced they would reduce flights to and from Japan because of lower demand than usual. After noticing that reservations were 30 percent lower than expected, they investigated the cause and feel it was because of prophecies that a major disaster would occur. Not only the manga, but a popular feng shui expert in Hong Kong also declared that a large earthquake would strike Japan sometime between June and August. This has prompted a response from Miyagi Prefecture Governor Yoshihiro Murai who said, 'I think it's a problem that this information, based on rather unscientific evidence, is spreading on social media and having an impact on tourism.' Governor Masazumi Gotoda of Tokushima Prefecture also pointed out that these kinds of disasters can happen anywhere at any time and all we can do is always be prepared. It's worth noting that in Japan there's a fairly steady stream of people calling for the next big one to happen sometime soon, and oftentimes book sales are involved. This is likely why online comments about this are filled with a sense of exasperation and cynicism. 'Gee, thanks a lot, occult YouTubers.' 'Here comes Tatsuki again. It's amazing so many people believe this stuff.' 'She's making quite an impact. I wonder how sales are doing.' 'Why does she only predict disasters?' 'Great, now I have to lose my virginity by July.' 'Just calling it a 'great disaster' is comfortably vague, isn't it?' 'Considering all this overtourism, I'd say she's doing us a favor.' 'If she's right about this one, I'll believe her. Otherwise, she can take a hike.' Two really is the magic number that few — if any — earthquake predictors have managed to achieve. Even those who claim to be able to predict them by scientific means tend to fall flat on their second attempt. So, it's probably safe to say that you wouldn't be taking a greater risk visiting Japan on July 5 than you would on any other day. Source: The Sankei Shimbun, Hachima Kiko Read more stories from SoraNews24. -- Secret stairs at Tokyo Station dungeon come with a serious warning -- Japanese scientist predicts another major earthquake in Japan by 2017 -- 'Mt. Fuji Should Erupt by 2015': Ryuku University Professor Emeritus External Link © SoraNews24
SoraNews24
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- SoraNews24
Manga predicting a major disaster this July affecting summer tourism numbers
Flights to/from Hong Kong affected by predictions on both ends of the routes. In July 1999, manga author Ryo Tatsuki published Watashi ga Mita Mirai ( The Future I Saw ) which was based on her own dream journal she had been keeping for years. 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 book received little mainstream attention until sometime after the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami on 11 March 2011. The story of Watashi ga Mita Mirai itself doesn't specifically mention the date or location of its envisioned major tsunami, but on the cover, a flurry of pages from her dream journal are illustrated, with one reading 'A Big Disaster on March 2011.' ▼ The date can be seen on the third page from the right That was enough to lend credit to Tatsuki's prophetic dreams and the manga's popularity spread like wildfire, with it being featured on every major television network. Some people also took advantage of Tatsuki's reclusive nature by impersonating her online and spreading their own predictions. This led to her releasing Watashi ga Mita Mirai Kanzenban ( The Future I Saw: The Complete Edition ) in 2021, which in addition to the original story, included addendums that clarified the reference to March 2011 and gave another grave prediction. In the book, Tatsuki explains that she originally wasn't sure if there was a connection between the date and the tsunami in the story, but she knew that was an important date so she included it on the cover. She also says that the next major disaster will take place on 5 July, 2025. It's a rather large leap of faith to believe her dreams are prophetic rather than coincidental imagination, but it's a leap that some are willing to take as the effect of Watashi ga Mita Mirai can be seen in tourism forecasts this summer. In Hong Kong, where the book became rather popular, Greater Bay Airlines has announced they would reduce flights to and from Japan because of lower demand than usual. After noticing that reservations were 30 percent lower than expected, they investigated the cause and feel it was because of prophecies that a major disaster would occur. Not only the manga, but a popular feng shui expert in Hong Kong also declared that a large earthquake would strike Japan sometime between June and August. This has prompted a response from Miyagi Prefecture Governor Yoshihiro Murai who said, 'I think it's a problem that this information, based on rather unscientific evidence, is spreading on social media and having an impact on tourism.' Governor Masazumi Gotoda of Tokushima Prefecture also pointed out that these kinds of disasters can happen anywhere at any time and all we can do is always be prepared. It's worth noting that in Japan there's a fairly steady stream of people calling for the next big one to happen sometime soon, and oftentimes book sales are involved. This is likely why online comments about this are filled with a sense of exasperation and cynicism. 'Gee, thanks a lot, occult YouTubers.' 'Here comes Tatsuki again. It's amazing so many people believe this stuff.' 'She's making quite an impact. I wonder how sales are doing.' 'Why does she only predict disasters?' 'Great, now I have to lose my virginity by July.' 'Just calling it a 'great disaster' is comfortably vague, isn't it?' 'Considering all this overtourism, I'd say she's doing us a favor.' 'If she's right about this one, I'll believe her. Otherwise, she can take a hike.' Two really is the magic number that few — if any — earthquake predictors have managed to achieve. Even those who claim to be able to predict them by scientific means tend to fall flat on their second attempt. So, it's probably safe to say that you wouldn't be taking ay greater risk visiting Japan on 5 July as you would on any other day. That being said, this prediction business does have way better odds than the lottery, so let me just throw out there that I predict Japan will have its first female Prime Minister in 2028. There, now I'll just cross my fingers and wait for the book deal to come my way. Source: The Sankei Shimbun, Hachima Kiko Featured image: Pakutaso Insert image © SoraNews24 ● Want to hear about SoraNews24's latest articles as soon as they're published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
