Have the predictions of Tatsuki Ryo come true?

Question

The Japanese manga author Tatsuki Ryo claimed to predict several events like the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the COVID19 pandemic, the deaths of Princess Diana and Freddy Mercury as well as some not yet happened disasters like a looming outbreak of Mount Fuji. These events supposedly happen after specific time intervals (15 days, 15 years etc) after prophetic dreams. Her predictions can be found in her 1999 comic "The Future As I See It" (私が見た未来 in Japanese) and are described on various websites, e.g.:

https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/manga-artist-in-limelight-for-her-frightening-prophecies

https://vanbun.blogspot.com/2021/07/this-artist-predict-future-accident.html

https://oyakudachi2525.com/2021/04/07/watashigamitamirai/ (in Japanese, Google Translation)

Several of her predictions "came true" before the publication date of said manga and I don't know whether they had been published in other media previously. I also don't have a copy or translation of the actual manga (save for some excerpts in the above links) so it's difficult to assess the predictions' accuracy solely based on secondary sources.

How many of her predictions were actually correct? Has she made more predictions elsewhere?

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As this is my first question on this site, please let me know how I can improve any issues with phrasing etc.

Answer 1

I purchased Tatsuki Ryo's manga and read it. This part of the question originates in a hoax:

"around 2020, an unknown virus will appear, reaching its peak in April; it will then vanish"

Tatsuki never predicted this. In 2020, a man impersonated her on Twitter and fabricated the prediction above as well as the claim that the virus would reappear in 2030. There is no mention of a virus in the 1999 book. As I mentioned in a comment to another answer, this bogus hindsight prophecy precisely imitates the wording of a real 2008 prediction by Sylvia Browne, and it's entirely likely that the impersonator was simply copying a story he saw about Browne's prediction.

This did appear in the manga, but it wasn't intended as a future prediction:

the deaths of Princess Diana and Freddy Mercury

Tatsuki's manga is an emotional discussion of her disturbing prophetic dreams and the death of Freddy Mercury is discussed at length. It had already occurred at the time the manga was first written. She does not say anything about Princess Diana but the word "DIANNA" appears in the background of one of the manga panels. Readers (possibly the impersonator first and foremost; his Twitter is suspended and I didn't want to dig in and check) interpreted this as a prediction after the fact.

This did not appear in the manga and in fact she argues against it:

a looming outbreak of Mount Fuji

I purchased the reprint of this book which was made in 2021. Tatsuki contributed an afterword to this reprint where she writes that Japanese people often dream about Mount Fuji erupting and it is always a metaphor for social upheaval. There is a small depiction of Mount Fuji erupting on the cover of the manga with no date attached to it.

This did appear, but not in the manga:

"There will be a huge catastrophe in March 2011"

This appeared on cover art that she drew in 1999. According to the 2021 afterword, she had a dream of this exact date in 1999 and added it to the cover illustration of her book, without explaining in detail since she didn't see any details. As the other answer points out this is a very generic prediction, made even more useless by the fact that it appears in tiny text on the cover of a mostly fictional manga collection with no further explanation.

Just to be clear, this is the sequence of events:

1. 1976, 1986: Tatsuki allegedly dreams about Freddie Mercury's death
2. 1991: Freddie Mercury dies
3. 1995 and 1996: Tatsuki illustrates her experiences in two manga stories, which appear in mystery fiction magazines. Note the timing. This was during the Aum Shinrikyo trial and Japanese society was on fire arguing about the validity of occult experiences and the need for skepticism.
4. 1999: Tatsuki dreams that a natural disaster of some kind will happen in March 2011. Without re-editing her previous manga stories, she inserts the prediction into the cover of a collected volume of her work (which is mostly fictional mystery stories)
5. 1999: Tatsuki retires from manga and gets a job in rural Japan; she continues having startling dreams but no longer tells anyone about them
6. 2020: Impersonator appears, draws attention to the manga cover, gets interviews with several magazines under false pretenses, is outed by journalists as a middle-aged man
7. 2021: Tatsuki's niece and nephew alert her to the impersonator drama; she contacts her publisher and gets the book reprinted with a lengthy afterword giving her opinions on spiritual matters

On the whole, Tatsuki clearly believes in prophetic dreams, as she purports to have had some and additionally predicts a massive Pacific earthquake in July 2025, but there is only one future event which is clearly shown in the manga, a tsunami (which she identifies, in 2021, not with the March 2011 quake but with her July 2025 prediction). The manga displays no intention to sell her abilities as a fortune teller, but only to recount the emotional experience of having dreams in the past and seek sympathy from others with similar experiences.

The claim "Have the predictions of Tatsuki Ryo come true?" is based on mostly on the 2020 hoax, since Tatsuki's original manga contained virtually no concrete predictions about future events and was mostly unconcerned with making predictions. However, there is incidentally an accurate prediction on the cover illustration that she drew to compile the manga into a collection.

Answer 2

The complete lack of specifics in these "predictions" are masked by the giving of dates.

Let's take one example..

"There will be a huge catastrophe in March 2011"

Well, yes. Now here is Wikipedias list of events tagged as "natural disasters in 2011". That's natural disasters only, it overlooks terrorism, industrial and other kinds, which are too numerous for Wikipedia to list individually.

Now let's also factor in, some basic statistics,sorry for the maths, I'll keep it brief. Suppose there are N "disasters" in the whole of 2011. How big does N have to be, before there is more than a 50% chance of a "disaster" specifically happening in March 2011? The answer mathematically is

1 - (11/12)^N > 0.5

Or solving this equation, N >= 7.966.

In other words, if there are only 8 "disasters" or "catastrophes" in 2011, the odds are more than 50/50 that one disaster/catastrophe will occur in March 2011. Wikipedia suggests that there are more disasters a year than it can count.

We can label any sizeable disaster we choose, as a "huge catastrophe", or any sizeable disaster between say, February and April 2011 as "very close to March 2011" as well, if we need to, and claim she "must" have seen it.

I'm completely unimpressed as a result. It looks like I could name virtually any future month and say theres a "huge catastrophe" and if needed I'm close enough on scale (close enough to "huge"?) or time (close enough to that month?),and it's virtually guaranteed that there will be some event that someone can argue "must" have been the one I "foresaw". Spooky, eh?

Actually, let's take a second example too...

"around 2020, an unknown virus will appear, reaching its peak in April; it will then vanish"

Let's consider this as an example of what I was saying above, about how people say "its close enough so I must have 'foreseen' it". A novel virus did appear, although in 2019 not 2020 it hit the world stage in 2020. It didn't "reach it's peak" in April, and didn't "then vanish", but we can conveniently choose to ignore those. Wow! Did she somehow foresee it?

Err. No. Not likely.

Novel (previously unknown/new) virii emerge all the time. Heres a partial list of some examples, all serious and lethal, and the dates of first known occurrence, as examples of how often a "new virus" appears - and these are only from among the serious, lethal, new virii......

• Spanish Flu (1918)
• H2N2 ("Asian Flu", 1957)
• Marburg virus (1967)
• Lassa (1969)
• H3N2 ("Hong Kong Flu", 1968)
• Ebola virus (1976)
• HIV (discovered 1981,virus reported 1984, now known 1959 or earlier)
• Ravn virus (1987)
• Taï Forest (1994)
• H1N1 ("Swine Flu", 2001)
• SARS (2002)
• Bundibugyo (2007)
• Lujo (2008)
• MERS (2012)
• H7N9 (2013)
• SARS-Cov-2 (2019)

Others also emerged as "new virii" (or new to science) but didnt cause a big or lethal outbreak, such as London1_novel CoV/2012

So yeah. Colour me not very impressed again. "Around" any time, depending how "around" you want to be", a new virus emerges. And those are only the lethal ones. So thats hardly stunning foresight. What do we know about this "foreseen virus"? Just 2 statements, both clearly not realised: that this virus would "peak in April" and "then vanish". Spooky accuracy again! Well,no. Fail, really.

In other words one statement that could hardly fail to come true, or had very reasonable chances of it (depending how "around" you want to be), and two incorrect statements.

As so often the case with scams, pseudoscience, "mind reading", "fortune telling", and wishful thinking....

The lack of detail is telling. A totally not hard to foresee "catastrophe" but no specifics. A totally not hard to foresee "virus" but no specifics.

If she had posted up a specific eruption or tsunami, or whatever, or the city of Wuhan, or told us the world would go into lockdown over it, or that it would have pangolins as a natural reservoir (or whatever), or some specific convincer (such as that masks would be a worldwide cultural change for the duration, even in countries they were never previously widely worn, or that Brazil's president would deny a virus' seriousness in 2020-21 and have protests), I'd be a little more curious. But as so often, no.