Last Updated:August 04, 2025, 09:36 IST
A Japanese manga artist's decades-old prediction about a July 2025 earthquake reignited public fear after tsunami waves hit on July 30, drawing over a million searches in China.

Children overlook the coastline during a precautionary tsunami warning following an earthquake off the coast of Russia (Photo: AP)
As tsunami waves struck the shores in Japan and Russia on July 30, people in China were looking out for “prophecy" on their phones. According to a report with CNN, the term gained more than 1.1 million views on a video app in the immediate aftermath of the Pacific tsunami.
The reason the term was massively being searched is that July 30’s tsunami had been foretold four years earlier, in a Japanese manga comic book.
According to the report, the book “The Future I Saw", published by manga artist Ryo Tatsuki in 1999, warned of a major disaster in March 2011, a date which turned out to coincide with the cataclysmic quake that struck Japan’s northern Tohoku region that month.
Later, in 2021, Tatsuki released another book named “Complete Version", which claimed that the next big earthquake would hit in July 2025.
The report claimed that Tatsuki has had an avid, and the same was proven earlier this year, when soon after the contents of the book went viral, tourists and other travellers cancelled their trips to Japan. While many were relieved as the authorities lifted the tsunami warning later, many remained on the edge.
It must be noted that earthquakes are impossible to predict, and seismologists have strongly cautioned against believing the rising number of so-called predictions. In one of her interviews with Japanese media in May, Tatsuki herself urged people not to be “overly swayed" by her dreams.
According to the report, Tatsuki’s manga depicts a cartoon version of herself gleaning visions from her slumbers, some of which turn out to bear a close resemblance to real-life events. Some fans believe she predicted the deaths of Princess Diana and Freddie Mercury, though sceptics say her visions are too vague to be taken seriously.
It was the 2011 quake that boosted belief in Tatsuki’s supposed prescience. Her 1999 manga “The Future I Saw" has the words “massive disaster in March, 2011" on the cover, leading many to believe that she predicted the 9.0 magnitude earthquake more than a decade before it hit Tohoku.
The 2011 tsunami in Japan killed just under 20,000 people. It was a terrible toll, but far fewer than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed 2,27,000 people throughout the region, primarily in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand.
In her 2021 follow-up, Tatsuki warned that an earthquake in the Philippine Sea on July 5 this year would cause tsunami waves three times as tall as those from the Tohoku earthquake, leading many to fear disaster sometime last month.
One of the ten largest earthquakes ever recorded struck Kamchatka, the sparsely populated Russian peninsula facing the Pacific, on July 30. The magnitude 8.8 quake had its epicentre in the sea just off the Kamchatka coast.
While four metre-high waves were reported in Russia, the waves projected elsewhere were smaller, ranging from 30 centimetres to 1 metre in China, and between 1 and 3 metres in parts of Japan, Hawaii and the Solomon Islands, as well as Ecuador and Chile on the other side of the Pacific.
In the past, tsunami alerts were issued using worst-case estimates based on simple tables linking quake size and location to fixed alert levels. These did not account for complex uncertainties in how the seafloor moved or how energy translated into how much water was displaced.
Vani Mehrotra is the Deputy News Editor at News18.com. She has nearly 10 years of experience in both national and international news and has previously worked on multiple desks.
Vani Mehrotra is the Deputy News Editor at News18.com. She has nearly 10 years of experience in both national and international news and has previously worked on multiple desks.
August 04, 2025, 09:36 IST
News world Pacific Tsunami Sparked 'Prophecy' Panic In China Over Manga Prediction: Report
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