Japanese Manga “The Future I Saw” Has Become a Hot Topic Throughout Japan
In recent years, the Japanese manga “The Future I Saw, the Complete Version” has become a hot topic throughout Japan.
The manga’s author, Ryo Tatsuki (たつき諒), began having prophetic dreams about future events in the late 1960s. She is known to have predicted the death of Freddie Mercury of the rock band Queen and the date of the Great East Japan Earthquake.
Her prophetic manga became a bestseller, selling 400,000 copies just one month after its release. NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, picked it up and received a tremendous response.
In this article, I would like to introduce you to how the author came to draw such a manga predicting the future and why it has become a topic of conversation throughout Japan.
The Reason Ryo Started Keeping Her Dream Diaries
At first, Ryo kept a notebook of ideas for her manga production. Then, around the time of her debut as a manga artist in 1976, she also began to record the content of her dreams while she slept.
After becoming a manga artist, she became habitual of keeping a writing utensil close at hand to jot down ideas as soon as they occurred to her. For this reason, she also kept a dream diary beside her bedside.
Ryo had several extremely impressive dreams that she did not forget when she woke up but remembered clearly. So she started taking notes after she had remarkable dreams, thinking that the dreams might have some meaning and something to do with her future self.
Initially, she recorded her dreams by writing them down on a piece of paper close by when she woke up from sleep. However, these pieces of paper would fall apart, and she would sometimes lose track of them when she had dreamed of them.
In 1985, her mother, who worked in a hospital, received some white books called “Tsukamihon (束見本)” from a patient who worked for a printing company. Only the book’s front cover was printed, and the inside pages were blank.
She decided to use those white books as her dream diaries, titled “Dream Records,” and began to record her dreams with illustrations and text.
These diaries have become so thick because newspaper clippings and photographs related to their content have been inserted between the pages.
She said she kept a dream diary because she found it interesting to analyze her dreams as a manifestation of her deep psychological state of mind by referring to a book on dream interpretation.
According to her, she did not have many unusual dreams. Like other people’s dreams, most of them were attributed to her personal mental and physical condition, so she did not consider them material for her manga production. So, the dream diary was just a private record for her personal enjoyment.
However, she did have several mysterious experiences of déjà vu, in which she encountered places and people’s faces in reality that she had seen in her dreams, although this was very rare.
A Dream Predicted the Death of Freddie Mercury of the British Rock Band Queen
On November 24, 1976, Ryo had a strange dream.
In the dream, she watched TV with her big Queen fan friend Y. Then the news came on, and they learned that Freddie had died of an infectious disease.
Freddie Mercury is in New Haven, CT, at a WPLR Show. By Carl Lender
Watching the news, Ryo wondered.
“What is the infectious disease? Freddie didn’t die from drugs or methamphetamine, did he?“
Y was shocked by the news of Freddy’s death and began to cry. Ryo tried to calm Y down, but she woke up from her dream.
She felt a strange, indescribable uneasiness, and the dream left such a strong impression on her. So she got out of bed and immediately wrote down the dream’s details in her dream diary before she forgot about it.
At that time, Ryo remembered someone saying,
If you tell people about your dream, it won’t come true.
So, she told her friends and acquaintances about the dream. But her friend Y cried, saying that she did not want Freddie to die, even in the dream.
Second Queen’s Dream
Ten years later, on November 28, 1986, Ryo had another dream about Queen. In the dream, she was watching TV alone. The TV program then was not news but about making a movie or something similar.
Strangely enough, in the dream, Ryo appeared in the program for some reason and saw statues of the members of the Queen.
There were four of these statues in total, but for some reason, only the statue of Freddie was missing. A statue of an unknown man had been added to the right of the other three statues (John Deacon, Brian May, and Roger Taylor). Roger asked a TV station employee what was wrong with the leftmost statue of Freddie.
Ryo did not dislike Freddie but wondered why he did not appear in her dreams.
Five years later, in November 1991, Ryo planned to go to England with her friend M for the first time in a long time. Two days before, on the 24th, while she was sleeping, M called her, urging her to watch the TV news.
When she turned on the TV and saw the news, she was astonished. The news reported that Freddie had died.
Surprised, she took out her dream diary and looked back at the records of her Queen dreams in 1986 and 1991. To her surprise, she had had those dreams in November, the same month that Freddie died.
In those dream diary notes, she had written her analysis that the TV programs in her dreams were messages to her, and if they were news programs, they were sometimes events that would happen in the future.
Dream of Princess Diana
On August 31, 1992, Ryo saw a piece of paper with a drawing and a word in her dream. The paper contained a picture of a woman holding a baby in a castle and the word “DIANNA [sic].” She then heard the voice of an elderly woman calling “Diana.”
After waking up from the dream, Ryo illustrated the drawing she had seen in her dream diary. In that dream diary, she notes that the woman in the drawing “is the Greek mythological Diana of the Sun [sic]” (Author’s note: Diana is the Roman goddess of hunting, chastity, and the moon.)
In any case, when she had the dream, she had no idea that it involved Princess Diana.
Five years later, on August 31, 1997, Princess Diana died in a car accident. The day of Princess Diana’s death, August 31, was coincidentally the same day that Ryo had the dream. Ryo said the elderly woman calling “Diana” in her dream sounded like Queen Elizabeth’s voice.
Dream of a Tsunami
Ryo has had dreams about a tsunami since she was a teenager (around the late 1960s).
The dream came as a tremendous shock to her. She was frightened by a huge wave about 100 feet high, and when she awoke from the dream, it was as memorable as a scene in a movie, and she could not forget it. So she decided to draw the dream in her manga while she could still remember it.
The following is a rough description of her tsunami dream in 1981.
It was cold enough to be winter that year, and small earthquakes were everywhere. In the dream, she was wearing summer clothes with short sleeves. Then, one summer day, the ocean water suddenly disappeared.
“The tide is going out!”
She was surprised by the tremendous undertow. Just a few minutes later, she heard a huge sound, like the explosive sound of a jet plane, echoing through her body from the depths of the earth.
As the sound grew closer and more specific, it revealed itself. With a roaring sound, a vast tsunami appeared—100 feet high!
“Mommy! Mommy!”
“Whaaaat!”
“Oh my!”
“Oooooh!”
With the screams of the people, she heard the word “Hades.” (Author’s note: Hades is the god of the dead and king of the underworld in ancient Greek religion and mythology.) It happened so fast.
Receiving the Message of the March 2011 Disaster
In July 1999, Ryo decided to retire as a manga artist and informed the editor-in-chief of her intention. The editor-in-chief suggested that the last of her published works be compiled and published as a comic book. The book would contain stories based on her dream diaries.
The cover for the comic was almost finished the day before the deadline. She had drawn several sheets of white paper around the woman’s head, on which she had drawn pictures and text from her dream diary. But one of the sheets was blank, and she wondered until the last minute what to draw on it.
That night, she had a strange dream. The following text appeared in a blank space like a movie screen.
The disaster will occur in March 2011.
When she woke up, she had an inspiration:
“I should write these words.“
She wrote these words on a blank piece of paper. She thought these words might come true and that it was better to write them than to regret not writing them. This was the last work she did before retiring as a manga artist, and the cover art for “The Future I Saw” was completed.
Twelve years after the publication of that manga, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami occurred in March 2011, and the date she saw in her dream came true.
Thus, her manga “The Future as I Saw It” became the focus of attention in Japan.
It was called a “phantom prophetic manga” because, at that time, the manga “The Future I Saw” was out of print and hard to get. It was priced at over 100,000 yen (about 660 US dollars).
But Ryo’s prophetic dreams do not end there.
She warns,
“The real catastrophe will come in July 2025.”
Published on April 1, 2024
Written by OTAKUPAPA
References
1． Ryo Tatsuki, October 2, 2021, “The Future I Saw: The Complete Version,” Asuka Shinsha.
2． Interview with Ryo Tatsuki, December 27, 2022, Bungeishunju ed. (https://bunshun.jp/articles/-/58980)
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