A grim prediction made in a manga first published a quarter of a century ago is being blamed for a dramatic fall in holiday bookings to Japan from several Asian countries.
Flight reservations to Japan from some of its key tourism markets have reportedly plummeted, with some linking the fall to The Future I Saw, a Japanese graphic novel based on the “prophetic” dreams of its author, Ryo Tatsuki.
The cover of the original, published in 1999, refers to a “great disaster” occurring in March 2011 – the date Japan experienced a deadly earthquake and tsunami. In a new edition containing additional material that was published in 2021, Tatsuki said the next major disaster would occur on 5 July 2025. Her claim has fuelled sensationalist social media posts warning people to stay away from Japan.
While there is no scientific basis to the claims that are fuelling online speculation, Tatsuki’s dreams have been given credence by her previous reference to March 2011, when an earthquake and tsunami killed more than 18,000 people in north-east Japan and triggered the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The impact of her latest prediction is being felt most in South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, which used ForwardKeys data to gauge the impact on airline bookings. Average bookings from Hong Kong were down 50% year-on-year, it said, adding that those between late June and early July had plummeted by as much as 83%.
A travel agency in Hong Kong said the manga had already affected people’s holiday plans, with bookings to Japan during the April-May spring break down by half from last year.
Greater Bay Airlines said it was initially puzzled that reservations for spring were lower than in previous years, given that demand is usually high during the cherry blossom-viewing season in Japan and the Easter holidays in Hong Kong.
“We expected around 80% of the seats to be taken, but actual reservations came to only 40%,” said Hiroki Ito, the general manager of the airline’s Japan office, told the Asahi Shimbun recently.
The airline – along with Hong Kong Airlines – has reduced services to Japan, even as officials pleaded with travellers to ignore the rumours. Yoshihiro Murai, the governor of Miyagi – one of three prefectures hardest hit by the 2011 disaster – said the unfounded story had started to affect tourism to the region and implored people to ignore them.
The trend is out of sync with a tourism boom that has seen record numbers of people visit Japan since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. A record 3.9 million people visited in April, encouraged by a weaker yen, while the government is hoping the annual number will grow to 60 million by the end of the decade.
The public broadcaster NHK said the manga had spawned more than 1,400 videos on YouTube – which have together been viewed more than 100m times – some of which added to the sense of alarm with predictions of a volcanic eruption and a meteor strike. The re-published version has sold almost 1m copies, it added.
Japan is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world due to its location on the Pacific’s seismically hyperactive “ring of fire”. But experts point out it is impossible to predict the timing and location of earthquakes with any accuracy.
Concern that the country could soon be struck by a major earthquake intensified last August, when the then prime minister, Fumio Kishida, cancelled an overseas trip after seismologists warned that the risk of a “megaquake” occurring off the country’s Pacific coast had increased after an earlier quake.
In April, a government taskforce said a quake of up to magnitude-9 in the Nankai Trough, located off Japan’s Pacific coast, would kill as many 298,000 people and destroy more than 2 million buildings, adding that there was a roughly 80% chance of such a quake happening in the next 30 years.
Tatsuki, meanwhile, has warned people not to take her predictions literally. In a recent interview with the Mainichi Shimbun, the artist said she was pleased that her work had raised awareness of the need to prepare for natural disasters, but added: “It’s important not to be unnecessarily influenced … and to listen to the opinions of experts.”
