Posted in: Comics, Current News, Manga | Tagged: Baba Manga, Ryo Tatsuki

Japanese Cancel Holidays Over "Nostradamus" "Baba Manga" Predictions

Japanese cancel holiday and travel plans over "Nostradamus" and "Baba Manga" predictions in Ryo Tatsuki's The Future I Saw

Japanese manga creator Ryo Tatsuki, dubbed "Baba Manga", has seen predictions from her comic book work, the 1999 manga The Future I Saw, play out in reality, including a catastrophic tsunami in July 2025. And it's enough to get the Japanese to change their travel and holiday plans. Events attributed to this work and others of hers include the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which claimed over 6,000 lives, and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which killed more than 18,000 and triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster. She's also credited with foreseeing the deaths of cultural icons like Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, which she described in 1999 as an "unknown virus" arriving in 2020.

Her work records and documents dreams since the 1980s and has seen her compared to Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga, who was credited as predicting  9/11 to Brexit. But while Baba Vanga's prophecies often leaned to the symbolic, Tatsuki's specificity, particularly around dates and locations, has amplified her influence, especially in East Asia.

Tatsuki's most immediate warning, detailed in a 2021 updated edition of The Future I Saw, predicts a cataclysmic event on the 5th of July, 2025. As reported by The Guardian, she envisions an undersea rupture between Japan and the Philippines, unleashing a tsunami "three times larger" than the 2011 Tohoku disaster. The New York Post notes her description of the Pacific Ocean "boiling" south of Japan, with a diamond-shaped impact zone encompassing Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Some interpret this as a potential undersea volcanic eruption, a scenario not entirely implausible given Japan's position on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where tectonic activity is a constant threat.

The Guardian also reports an 83% drop in flight bookings to Japan from key markets like Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan, with Hong Kong-based travel agency WWPKG noting a 50% decline in bookings during the Easter holiday. "We expected around 80% of the seats to be taken, but actual reservations came to only 40%," said Hiroki Ito, the general manager of the airline's Japan office. .Bloomberg Intelligence data has seen late June to early July bookings plummeting as tourists, particularly from China and Hong Kong, Japan's second-and fourth-largest tourist sources, cancel or postpone trips. Social media platforms like Weibo, TikTok, and X use the hashtag #July2025Prediction, where users share everything from survival gear purchases to memes juxtaposing Tatsuki's manga panels with apocalyptic imagery. Online retailers have also reported spikes in sales of survival gear. "It would be a major problem if the spread of unscientific rumours on social media had an effect on tourism. There is no reason to worry because the Japanese are not fleeing abroad … I hope people will ignore the rumours and visit," said Yoshihiro Murai, governor of the Miyagi Prefecture, at a press conference. Because, yes, they had to have a press conference over this.

The Future I Saw has inspired thousands of videos on YouTube, viewed more than 100 million times, that are adding to the panic, predicting a volcanic eruption and a meteor strike, and the re-published version of the manga has sold almost a million copies. Tatsuki has warned people not to take her predictions literally, saying, "It's important not to be unnecessarily influenced … and to listen to the opinions of experts." Are they? No.

The New York Post quotes experts who acknowledge that the region Tatsuki describes is geologically active, particularly the Nankai Trough, a fault zone capable of producing a megathrust earthquake. A Japanese government task force warned in April 2025 that such an event could kill up to 298,000 people and cause $1.81 trillion in economic damage. Yet, as the Japan Meteorological Agency emphasises, predicting the exact time and place of earthquakes remains scientifically impossible.

Sceptics point to previous missteps, like a dream predicting her own death in 2000 or a Mount Fuji eruption that never occurred, as evidence of inconsistency. But there may be more to come. The Daily Mail highlights her forecast of a deadly virus, potentially a COVID-19 resurgence, returning in 2030 to wreak "greater devastation" than the 2020 pandemic, which killed over 7 million people. In The Future I Saw, she wrote, "An unknown virus will come in 2020, will disappear after peaking in April, and appear again 10 years later."

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