Japan tsunami advisory: Japanese Baba Vanga predicted mega waves years before earthquake; ‘new Simpsons’

nippon’s net is erstwhile once again gripped by unease and wonder over a manga artist whose work has earned a reputation for unsettling accuracy.

Ryo Tatsuki, a 70-year-old illustrator, has gone viral after renewed attention on her 1999 manga The Future That I Saw, which documents a series of dreams she claims foretold real-world disasters.

The latest cause for alarm is a grim prediction: a massive tsunami striking Japan in July 2025.

This is as an earthquake of magnitude 7.6 struck Japan on Monday evening, triggering a tsunami of up to 50 centimetres in Pacific coast communities, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). It said that the surges could potentially get higher.

Interest in the manga resurfaced after readers linked it to events such as the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.

One chapter, chillingly titled “March 2011 Great Disaster Comes,” appears to mirror both the timing and scale of the catastrophe that hit on March 11 that year.

Many were also alarmed as the Tatsuki's dream journal mentioned the deaths of Princess Diana and Freddie Mercury. It even mentioned a mysterious virus peaking in 2020, which many now connected to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Mashable.

The virus could even return a decade later, it said.

In the expanded edition of The Future That I Saw, Tatsuki describes a nightmare involving what she calls an unprecedented tsunami. In the manga, she writes of “the ocean south of Japan boiling,” with “giant bubbles” rising from a diamond-shaped region linking the Northern Mariana Islands, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Japan.

“The tsunami is three times bigger than the one in 2011,” she wrote, a line that has helped the book earn a cult reputation as a “prophetic comic strip.”

Japan’s vulnerability, sitting along the Pacific Ring of Fire has led some readers to take the prediction more seriously than an ordinary fictional warning. Social media is now filled with reactions ranging from genuine anxiety and disaster preparedness to sarcasm and memes.

Online, Tatsuki has been dubbed the “Japanese Baba Vanga,” with others joking that her work is “The Simpsons of manga.” One user quipped, “Her diary is the real Death Note.”

Scientists and skeptics, however, are urging restraint. “She might be a visionary,” one post read, “but earthquakes aren’t made of ink and dreams. Let’s stick to science and seismology.”

Tatsuki herself has largely stayed quiet amid the renewed attention. Still, decades after its release, The Future That I Saw has returned to the spotlight, this time with a mix of fascination, fear, and fierce debate over where imagination ends and coincidence begins.

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