There’s a rumor going around that a massive earthquake will hit Japan on July 5th this year. Personally, I’m highly skeptical of anything occult or spiritual—so I don’t believe a word of it. Still, this rumor spread so explosively through social media in Hong Kong and Taiwan that it actually led some airlines to cancel or reduce flights to Japan.
The origin of this rumor can be traced back to a manga published in 1999, Watashi ga Mita Mirai (私が見た未来, The Future I Saw), in which the author recounts her prophetic dreams. The cover famously bore the words “Great Disaster in March 2011,” which later became a topic of discussion after the actual Tohoku earthquake and tsunami struck. That terrifying footage of the tsunami swallowing entire towns is something people all over the world witnessed on the news. In 2021, a “complete edition” of the manga was released, with the author adding that “the true disaster will come in July 2025.” This new “prophecy” quickly gained traction on social media and reignited public fascination.
Just because I don’t believe in the occult doesn’t mean I’m uninterested, quite the opposite. I’m fascinated by the cultural and psychological mechanisms that allow these stories to grip people so powerfully.
Looking back, even before I was born, Japan was swept up in the Nostradamus craze of the 1970s. Author Ben Goto’s The Prophecies of Nostradamus series, which warned that “the seventh month of 1999 will bring the end of humanity,” became a nationwide bestseller, selling over six million copies. Of course, the “King of Terror” never showed up in July 1999, and doomsday itself turned into a kind of national festival—an almost celebratory spectacle that many still remember well.
Behind this boom in apocalyptic thinking, there was a persistent sense of “quiet collapse” in society at the time. The Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union dragged on until 1989, and the possibility of the world ending in nuclear fire was a very real fear. In Japan, I learned about the country’s four major pollution diseases (Minamata disease, Itai-itai disease, Yokkaichi asthma, and Niigata Minamata disease) in social studies class, and I’ve heard from older generations that, during the summer, photochemical smog warnings were a frequent occurrence in the cities. It wasn’t uncommon, they say, for the horizon to be shrouded in haze, even on sunny days.
By the 1980s, television was filled day after day with news about environmental destruction—stories of the hole in the ozone layer and a surge in skin cancer caused by ultraviolet rays. The vague but growing fear that the Earth was being irreparably damaged seeped deep into the public consciousness. Then, in 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster struck, compounding these anxieties. It’s no wonder that many people began to feel as if the world itself might be coming to an end.
These apocalyptic images took root in pop culture, too. The manga Fist of the North Star (Hokuto no Ken), which began serialization in 1983, opens with the shocking line, “The world was engulfed in nuclear fire in 199X,” and depicted a post-apocalyptic wasteland—a vision that made Japan’s “end of the century anxiety” tangible for both children and adults. Around the same time, AKIRA (1982–1990) told the story of runaway psychic powers and military experiments that reduce Tokyo to ashes yet again, while Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) turned the question of “the end of humanity = salvation” into a coming-of-age metaphor through its theme of “the Human Instrumentality Project.”
Why are people drawn to these frightening stories about the future? As sociologist Robert K. Merton noted, when uncertainty increases, people seek “meaning.” The poetic ambiguity of Nostradamus’s quatrains, or the dreamlike illustrations in Watashi ga Mita Mirai, offer plenty of room for personal interpretation, a blank canvas onto which anyone can project their own anxieties. There may also be a kind of comfort in sharing the same fear as others, a pseudo-community built around a common sense of dread.
Sadly, sources of anxiety are far from scarce these days: pandemics, climate change, the threat of AI-induced job loss, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East… According to a survey by Japan’s National Institution for Youth Education, nearly 80% of high school students report feeling anxious about their future.
Social media algorithms are designed to prioritize strong emotions like anger and fear, making negative information spread further and faster than ever. In today’s world, “digitally amplified anxiety” crosses borders in an instant, and as we’ve seen, can even have a direct economic impact—like the recent sharp decline in travel demand from Taiwan and Hong Kong to Japan.
In the end, doomsday prophecies are perhaps a way of transforming the restless anxiety of “what if the world is ending?” into stories that anyone can understand. Nostradamus’s predictions reflected the fears of the Cold War and environmental crises, while Watashi ga Mita Mirai mirrors the uncertainties of our own era. It’s precisely because we feel anxious that we find the motivation to prepare. Even if the predictions turn out to be wrong, Japan is surrounded by active fault lines, and a major earthquake is all but inevitable sooner or later. If the unease sparked by this latest rumor leads more people to take disaster preparedness seriously, then at least some good may come of it.
