As powerful waves surged across the vast Pacific on Wednesday, people around the world remained glued to their phones, tracking the tsunami’s fast progress.
But in China, more than a million people were searching for an unusual term: “Prophecy.”
That’s because, for some, the natural disaster had seemingly been foretold four years earlier, in a Japanese manga comic book.
Published in 2021 by artist Ryo Tatsuki – whose fans say her earlier works have been similarly prophetic – the manga claimed that the next big earthquake would hit this July, sparking a flurry of viral internet memes and debates across much of Asia in recent months.
In China, a search term related to Tatsuki’s so-called “prophecy” gained more than 1.1 million views on the video app Douyin in the immediate aftermath of Wednesday’s Pacific tsunami.
