'Japan's Baba Vanga': Ryo Tatsuki's 'The Future I Saw' prophecies
Ryo Tatuski is known for her manga art, but she is also well known for her eerie predictions. Read on to find out more.
Image: Ruins from Kobe Great Hanshin earthquake in 1995 preserved at Port of Kobe Earthquake Memorial Park. Ryo Tatsuki dreamt about the earthquake 15 days before it happened | Gaid Kornsilapa / Shutterstock.com
At a first glance, Ryo Tatsuki is a talented artist who was once established in the world of manga. Now in her 70s, she has since retired from her craft. However, there is something about her work that makes her stand out: her claims of future predictions via prophetic dreams.
Join us here at Sky HISTORY as we dive deeper into the predictions of Ryo Tatsuki and how she became an odd representation of mysticism, hysteria and pop culture in our current day and age.
Who is Ryo Tatsuki?
Ryo Tatsuki was born in the Kanagawa Prefecture in the Kanto region in Honshu, Japan, on 2nd December, 1954. Tatsuki became a manga artist in the 1970s, and around this time, she also started having strange dreams. She started writing these dreams down in 1985 after her mother gave her a notebook.
In the 1990s, Tatsuki suffered from severe writer's block and made the decision to quit her writing career entirely. For her final project, Tatsuki created a compilation of her previous manga as well as her dream notebook entries.
The Future I Saw and its premonitions
The compilation was called The Future I Saw, or Watashiga Ga Mita Mirai in Japanese, and it was published on 1st July 1999. The manga included recollections of dreams Tatsuki had experienced over the years. Some of these dreams had similarities to real life events.
For instance, Tatsuki claims that on 24th November 1976, she dreamt about the sudden death of the infamous Queen lead singer, Freddie Mercury. She then states that she dreamt of him again a decade later on 29th November, 1986. In this dream, she claims to have envisioned the other Queen members alongside a statue of a man she could not identify. Mercury passed away on 24th November 1991, which was exactly 15 years after Tatsuki claimed to have dreamt about him.
Another premonition of sorts relates to Princess Diana, when, in 1992, Tatsuki had a dream where she heard a voice of a woman with the name Diana. She also dreamt of a woman's portrait. Princess Diana passed away in a car accident on 31st August 1997. Tatsuki went on to say that readers had interpreted the themes of death with this dream, but that Tatsuki herself did not sense this when she dreamt it.
Other oddly accurate predictions from Tatsuki include a diary entry from 2nd January 1995, when she dreamt about earth cracks in Kobe, Japan. 15 days later, Kobe was hit by the Great Hanshin earthquake. An entry from 1995 also predicted an unknown virus that would emerge in 2020. This came to be with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The tsunami and earthquake in Tohoku
The Future I Saw went under the radar until 2011, when it received mainstream media attention due to an odd similarity. The cover art of The Future I Saw referenced a disaster that would occur in March 2011. On 11th March, 2011, the Tohoku region in Japan experienced a six minute long undersea megathrust earthquake. The quake was the strongest recorded in Japan, and it triggered a significant tsunami.
This strange coincidence led to a surge in popularity for the manga and a fascination with Tatsuki’s predictions. The attention led to Tatsuki being dubbed 'Japan's Baba Vanga', referencing the Bulgarian mystic who claimed to have visions of the future.
Upcoming predictions and predictions that didn't happen
Tatsuki’s most recent prediction revolved around a “mega tsunami” that would occur on 5th July 2025. This prediction ended up having an effect on summer tourism in Japan and 25 days later, on 30th July 2025, an 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Russia triggered tsunami warnings across Japan and the Pacific. Another prediction was that Mount Fuji would erupt in August 2021, but this did not happen.
There are also some predictions that haven’t come to be yet. For instance, Tatsuki dreamt that the 'unknown virus' would return in 2030. Whilst the aforementioned Mount Fuji prediction didn’t happen, Tatsuki noted that she also saw the eruption potentially happening within the next 15 years.
Only time will tell if Ryo Tastuki’s future dreams will become reality, and only she knows for sure what she saw in her dreams. What is clear is that, if the dreams compiled in The Future I Saw are entirely accurate, there is no doubt that some of Tatsuki’s dreams have strange similarities to real life.
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