July 5, 2025: a doomsday prophecy that didn’t come true

What the prophecy says

In 1999 the manga artist Ryo Tatsuki published The Future I Saw, a book she said was drawn from her own dreams; the South China Morning Post describes it as a bestseller. Its original cover carried a line that some readers later connected to the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that struck northeastern Japan in March 2011, and that early history is part of why readers took a 2021 reprint’s new warning so seriously.

That 2021 edition, marketed as the complete version, carried a new line on its cover: “The real disaster will come in July 2025.” The disaster it describes is the seabed cracking open between Japan and the Philippines, sending waves three times the height of the 2011 Tohoku tsunami into southwestern Japan, according to the South China Morning Post.

Where the July 5 date came from

The 2021 edition names a month and a year, not a single day. Online accounts nonetheless settled on July 5, 2025, as the date of the coming disaster, and posts repeating that date drew millions of views on social media, the South China Morning Post reported. Alarm spread quickly in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, Newsweek reported, and Tatsuki’s publisher has since denied that she ever predicted a specific date at all.

How the rumor spread, especially in Hong Kong

The date spread furthest in Hong Kong and on Chinese-language social media, feeding on existing anxiety about earthquakes. A Hong Kong feng shui practitioner’s own forecast of a major quake sometime between June and August added to the unease, Japan Today reported, and the two unrelated predictions reinforced each other as they circulated online together.

Skepticism at home

Not everyone found the prophecy convincing. Some Japanese commenters online were openly skeptical of it, pointing out that this was not the first time a specific disaster date had circulated on social media, and noting how often such predictions coincided with a book’s publication schedule, Japan Today reported.

The toll on travel

Japan had just recorded its highest-ever April arrivals, 3.9 million visitors, when the rumor began cutting into bookings from Hong Kong, where visitor numbers fell 11 percent year over year in May, ABC News Australia and NBC News reported. The Hong Kong travel agency EGL Tours said its Japan-related business had halved.

Greater Bay Airlines, a Hong Kong carrier, told Japan Today it had looked into the drop in demand and concluded the prophecy was the cause, with reservations running 30 percent below expectations; it suspended its Tokushima route indefinitely from September, and Newsweek reported that other carriers signaled similar reductions. Miyagi Prefecture’s governor, Yoshihiro Murai, said the rumor, “based on rather unscientific evidence,” was hurting tourism, and Tokushima’s governor, Masazumi Gotoda, said a disaster could strike anywhere, at any time.

What scientists and officials said

Ayataka Ebita of the Japan Meteorological Agency told a news conference that any earthquakes coinciding with the prophecy were “absolutely a coincidence” and that “there is no causal connection,” adding that “current science is unable to accurately predict earthquakes.” Robert Geller, a seismology professor at the University of Tokyo, called earthquake prediction impossible, saying, “None of the predictions I’ve experienced in my scientific career have come close at all.”

The author’s response

Tatsuki has tried to distance herself from the rumor, and NBC News reported that she disputed the July 5 interpretation of her own work. Her publisher issued a statement saying she was “not a prophet” and that she had never named a specific date for any catastrophic event. One bookstore reportedly displayed the manga under a banner reading, “Whether you believe it or not is up to you.”

What happened on July 5

In the weeks around July 5, a swarm of earthquakes shook Japan, and the Japan Meteorological Agency addressed the prophecy directly at a news conference. No seabed cracked open, and no wave anything like the one the manga describes struck Japan that day or in the days after. Japan Today’s own reporting on the rumor concluded that visiting the country on July 5 carried no greater risk than visiting on any other day.

Verdict

This is a prophecy that can be checked against a public record: a specific book, a date attached to it after publication by online readers rather than the author, and a day that came and went without the seabed cracking or the waves the manga described. Scientists say no earthquake can be predicted that precisely. Real or Legend records this prophecy as not having happened.