Ryo Tatsuki, a comic artist from Japan, has made many predictions which have come true including the Covid-19 pandemic, leading her to be compared to the Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga
A terrifying prediction has been made by a psychic who has been dubbed Japan’s Baba Vanga and it is due to come true in just five years, in 2030.
Ryo Tatsuki is a comic artist, who had correctly foreseen deaths including those of Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana as well as natural disasters like the Kobe earthquake in 2011 and health alarms such as the Covid-19 pandemic. She has been compared to Baba Vanga, the famous Bulgarian mystic, whose real name was Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova, and died at the age of 84 in 1996 having become famous for her clairvoyance.
Baba Vanga claimed to have gained her powers during a terrible storm, when she lost her eyesight at 12 years old. And she is believed to have had such strong visions that 85% of them are correct.
Now Ms Tatsuki is predicting another deadly virus for 2030 which is similar to that which hit the globe five years ago. In her book, The Future as I See It, published in 1999, the Japanese mystic described an ‘unknown virus’ in 2020, leading many people to believe she correctly predicted Covid.
“An unknown virus will come in 2020, will disappear after peaking in April, and appear again 10 years later,” she wrote. And worryingly she also believes a horrific virus will “return in 2030” and cause even “greater devastation”. It coincides with Covid cases rising currently in India where people have been warned to be vigilant.
Meanwhile, holiday bookings have dipped sharply for Japan over another of Ms Tatsuki’s predictions. Fear of another big earthquake in Japan has been building for years with the country sitting on a seismic fault line and it is no stranger to tremors.
In fact, the country experiences around 1,500 noticeable earthquakes each year, according to the EarthScope Consortium and JRailPass.com. These earthquakes occur daily, though many are too small to be felt.
The most recent major earthquake in Japan was on March 11, 2011 with a 9.0 magnitude force and was predicted by Ms Tatsuki. It caused a massive tsunami that claimed thousands of lives and led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
Given that context, anxiety about a similar event seems understandable. Four years ago Ms Tatsuki published an updated version of her book which predicted another earthquake, this one in July 2025, and it is now affecting tourism it appears.
CN Yuen, managing director of WWPKG, a travel agency based in Hong Kong, told CNN that bookings to Japan dropped by half during the Easter holiday.
They are expected to dip further in the coming two months. Visitors from China and Hong Kong, which are Japan’s second and fourth biggest source of tourists, have dropped significantly. In Thailand and Vietnam posts online warning of earthquake danger have been gaining traction.
The impact of her latest prediction is also being felt in South Korea and Taiwan, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. It used ForwardKeys data to gauge the impact on airline bookings and found that average bookings from Hong Kong were down 50% year-on-year. Flights between late June and early July had plummeted by as much as 83%.
“We expected around 80% of the seats to be taken, but actual reservations came to only 40%,” Hiroki Ito, the general manager of the airline’s Japan office, told the Asahi Shimbun following the sharp dip in travel over Easter.
“The quake speculations are definitely having a negative impact on Japan tourism and it will slow the boom temporarily,” said Eric Zhu, Bloomberg Intelligence’s analyst for aviation and defense. “Travelers are taking a risk-adverse approach given the plethora of other short-haul options in the region.”