Ryo Tatsuki: The Prophecy Rebuilt from a Dream and the July 5 Panic

On 11 March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan’s Tōhoku region. More than 18,000 people died or remained missing, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant failed, and the world watched a high-tech country overwhelmed by the sea. After the disaster, readers dug up an old manga: 私が見た未来, usually translated as The Future I Saw, by the artist Ryo Tatsuki.

The book had been published in 1999. Its cover mentioned a “great disaster” in March 2011. When the Tōhoku disaster happened in that month, the sentence became proof that Tatsuki had seen the future. People searched for surviving copies, compared drawings with news photographs, and gave the artist the title “the new Baba Vanga.”