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.
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.
