What If a Mega Earthquake Struck Tokyo on July 5, 2025?
A manga artist who correctly predicted the Fukushima 2011 earthquake now warns that in July 5, 2025, a mega-quake will hit Tokyo
Table of Contents
The manga author who predicted Fukushima warns Tokyo is next
July 5, 2025: The Day of the Tokyo Megaquake
Which parts of Tokyo will be destroyed, and which ones will survive
How many people will die?
What a megaquake will do to Japan’s economy
The biggest lesson: Belief won’t save you, but preparation might
About the Data & Sources
The manga author who predicted Fukushima warns Tokyo is next
Ryo Tatsuki, a manga artist famous for predicting the 2011 Fukushima disaster, has returned to the spotlight with a chilling new prophecy: A catastrophic earthquake will strike Tokyo on July 5, 2025.
Tatsuki has an undeniably spooky track record. Her manga The Future I Saw gained cult status after it appeared to foresee the 1995 Kobe earthquake, and even more ominously, it warned that “a huge catastrophe will occur in March 2011,” eerily aligning with the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
This ‘news’ of the of a mega-quake leveling Tokyo spread on Asian social media like wildfire. Travel forums lit up with panic, thousands of Chinese tourists canceled Tokyo trips, and Hong Kong travel agencies reported bookings plunging by as much as 50%. The Chinese embassy in Tokyo, after issuing a routine caution in April for citizens to “take precautions against natural disasters,” was taken by many to be an official validation that the disaster is already a fact.
Seismologists and officials has tried to calm the public: No technology exists to predict quakes so precisely and Tokyo had countless false alarms in the past. But the allure of a foretold disaster proved irresistible to many. Many Japanese TV shows pitted scientists against believers. And all around Tokyo, grocery stores are selling out of emergency kits and supplies.
But what if she really is right? What if, on July 5, a mega-quake rips straight through the heart of Tokyo?
What follows is my imagined diary of the earthquake that could change everything, drawn from Japanese Cabinet Office’s worst-case simulations, historic quake records, and current engineering data:
July 5, 2025: The day of the Tokyo Megaquake
8:17 a.m.
Coffee in hand, I was staring out the window on the 21st floor of an office tower in Shinjuku when suddenly, an unmistakable sound erupts. Every phone on the floor begins to ring simultaneously:
Only moments pass when I start feeling a slow rumbling.
Then a jolt!
A violent swerve that throws me against my desk. The floor ripples beneath my feet. Glass shatters somewhere down the hall. A strangled cry rises from a coworker as our skyscraper wobble side to side. Bookshelves and computers crash to the floor. I duck under my desk, as the creaking sound of steel and concrete fills the air. The entire 47-story building is dancing unnaturally.
Over the office PA system, a panicked voice is reciting, “Earthquake! Earthquake! Stay away from the windows!” but half the ceiling tiles have already come crashing down. I bite my lip, tasting blood, and cling to the desk’s metal legs as if it were a life raft in a storm.
8:19 a.m.
The shaking intensifies. It feels like the Earth itself is having a seizure.
I hear the screech of bending metal beams high above. The lights flicker, then fail; we’re plunged into semi-darkness punctuated only by the emergency exit signs’ red glow. Outside the window, which is now a cracked spiderweb of glass, I catch snatches of a terrifying view: The forest of skyscrapers in Shinjuku is swaying like trees in a storm. In the distance, I can just make out the form of Tokyo Skytree on the eastern horizon, the 634-meter broadcast tower that usually dominates the skyline shaking wildly.
![The Japanese Earthquake Resistance Technologies that Support TOKYO SKYTREE | TOKYO UPDATES [The Official Information Website of Tokyo Metropolitan Government]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FZYf!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faf93d62c-eb67-43b2-8d03-551699602ada_1200x630.jpeg "The Japanese Earthquake Resistance Technologies that Support TOKYO SKYTREE | TOKYO UPDATES [The Official Information Website of Tokyo Metropolitan Government]")
I shut my eyes, convinced it will snap in half. But it endures.
The roar of the quake is everywhere, a low-frequency growl mixed with sharper sounds of things breaking, collapsing, falling. The building’s fire alarms finally trip and begin their own shrill scream.
8:25 a.m.
The main shock subsides. The office is a wreck of toppled chairs, shattered glass, and dislodged ceiling panels. Amazingly, our skyscraper still stands; it did what it was designed to do, it swayed, absorbed the energy.
As our terrified group of employees makes its way down darkened emergency stairwells, the real scale of the disaster reveals itself. Dust and smoke curl upward from low-rise blocks nearby. On reaching the ground level, we step out into a city transformed.
The Shinjuku intersection is jammed with halted cars, many at odd angles or crashed and the traffic lights are dead. A crowd of office workers, some with bloodied faces or arms, stands in the middle of the street, eyes cast upward. Above us, the glass facade of a tall building has partially sheared off, raining glittering shards onto the street like deadly confetti.
9:00 a.m.
A moderate tremor sends the crowd into a fresh panic. People scream and duck instinctively. Concrete dust billows from an already cracked wall.
With trains stopped and roads buckled, thousands of commuters flood the streets on foot. Without really thinking, I decide to head toward Ginza.
The city’s familiar geography has turned hostile. Fissures zigzag across major avenues, some wide enough to swallow a motorcycle. I navigate my way to on Omotesando Avenue, passing a city bus that has smashed into a sidewalk. Its passengers are still inside climbing out through broken windows.
9:30 a.m.
On my way to Ginza, I reach Shibuya, now resembles a disaster movie set. Part of the Shibuya train station façade has collapsed; I see the tangled steel of what used to be the pedestrian footbridge connecting to Shibuya Mark City. The famous Shibuya Scramble Crossing is covered in debris, shattered glass, chunks of concrete, an overturned taxi. Amid the debris, dozens of people tend to the injured. The odor of gas leaks and smoke saturates the air.
My phone is useless – the network is entirely down. A uniformed station staffer with a megaphone is directing people away from the precariously damaged station building, urging calm.
10:15 a.m.
As I push onward toward Ginza, I see the contrast of the damage. Modern quake-resistant buildings stand glaringly intact amid the wreckage of older neighboring structures. I pass through Aoyama and Akasaka, where many mid-rise apartments built in the last decade show cracks but haven’t collapsed. Yet in the narrow backstreets nearby, I find a row of traditional wooden houses reduced to splintered rubble, smoke rising from what had been someone’s kitchen. Neighbors are already climbing over the timbers with garden hoses, dousing flames and frantically searching for anyone inside.
Reaching Ginza by foot is like traversing a war zone. Tokyo’s glittering luxury district has been dealt a heavy blow. The old Wako Clock Tower, Ginza’s iconic centerpiece dating from the 1930s, still stands, but one of its corners has crumbled, and the clock is eerily stopped at 8:19.
Several blocks south, I see that a fire has engulfed a row of buildings along the edge of Tsukiji, plumes of dark smoke and the roar of flames consuming what might be an old electronics store and adjacent restaurants. Firefighters haven’t arrived here yet; traffic gridlock and road damage are slowing responders. Shop staff and bystanders form human chains to ferry valuables and equipment out of buildings before the fire can spread further. I notice a small crowd attempting to use Ginza’s famous brick streets as improvised firebreaks, tearing up bricks to get at a water main beneath. The water mains, however, are broken – no water comes. It’s a haunting echo of accounts from the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, when broken pipes left firefighters helpless against raging infernos.
Ginza is not safe… I decide to push on towards Roppongi.
11:00 a.m.
In Roppongi Hills, that sleek vertical city of glass and steel, the landmark Mori Tower remains upright and relatively unharmed, its modern seismic design clearly did its job. From a distance I can see its silhouette, still punctuating the skyline. But Roppongi’s narrow side streets are not so lucky…
I come across expats and locals alike using a battery-powered radio to coordinate, translating news for each other and offering phone battery packs to those trying to reach loved ones. There’s a faint collective cheer when the radio announces that the Prime Minister has activated the emergency response plan and mobilized the Self-Defense Forces. Portable community wireless hubs are being set up in Ueno park, the announcer says, to restore communications.
I decide to head there.
12:30 p.m.
By midday, hundreds of fires are reported across the metropolis. I stand on a rise in Ueno Park alongside a crowd of evacuees and office workers, all silently watching a thick column of black smoke towering over the city’s east side. “Sumida’s on fire,” someone murmurs. My mind races to Sumida Ward, one of Tokyo's areas most vulnerable to earthquakes, dense with old wooden homes and factories.
Helicopters thump overhead, heading toward the worst-hit districts. For the first time I notice the endless wail of emergency sirens has been joined by loudspeaker announcements: The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has trucks roaming the city, blaring instructions for evacuation to the nearest disaster shelters, school yards or parks, and warnings to prepare for more aftershocks. With the trains and subways halted, millions of people are stranded far from home.
All around, the normally humming Tokyo is eerily devoid of power, no traffic lights, no neon, no humming vending machines. The only illumination comes from the harsh midday sun and the orange glow of fires on the horizon.
2:00 p.m.
The ground starts rumbling and I hear a collective scream from hundreds of people around me taking shelter in the open. A distant crash tells me another structure has given way.
Meanwhile, out at Tokyo Bay, the reclaimed lands have taken a beating. I hear reports that the runway at Haneda Airport has cracked and part of it slumped into the bay.
Tokyo’s lifelines are severed: all commuter rail lines are stopped; highways in and out of the city are either destroyed or clogged with a sea of evacuees; even the Shinkansen bullet trains have automatically braked to a halt nationwide.
The city is effectively cut off, left to rely on its own emergency resources for the critical first day.
5:00 p.m.
The sun slowly starts to go down.
Aftershocks rattle the ground every hour or two, each sending waves of panic through the camps and debris-littered streets. Tokyo Tower, the beloved red-and-white symbol of the city, is visibly scarred, its tip bent and its steel lattice warped, but it still stands defiant on the horizon of Minato Ward.
8:00 p.m.
Nightfall.
There is a strange quiet in some neighborhoods away from the sirens. Emergency shelters fill up to capacity, hosting not just residents whose homes are gone or unsafe, but also over 4 million commuters unable to get home to the suburbs.
In one such shelter at a high school gym, I see strangers sharing blankets and radios, exchanging news: “The US and China offered aid already,” mentions someone, reading from a text alert that miraculously went through. Rumors mix with facts: Some whisper that Mount Fuji has started rumbling, others say a tsunami is coming. Luckily, it seems like both rumors are false.
Volunteer groups roam the streets handing out hot tea and comfort, while rescue teams from around Japan are finally arriving in the city, weaving through the wreckage with dogs and sonar devices, searching collapsed buildings for signs of life. Occasionally, a faint cheer erupts in the distance as someone is pulled out alive from debris.
11:45 p.m.
I scribble notes by flashlight in a notebook (the power on my phone died hours ago). The date has nearly changed, but for Tokyo’s residents, July 5, 2025 will never truly end. Many are still outdoors, too afraid to return indoors due to relentless aftershocks. The air is chilly and carries a bitter taste of soot. As I sit on a curb alongside other dazed survivors, I realize this is the first moment I’ve had to reflect all day. We are alive.
Around me, despite all the destruction and loss, I see countless acts of quiet heroism and solidarity: Young people gently bandaging an old man’s cut feet after he walked barefoot over broken glass; restaurant owners cooking up whatever food they have to distribute free meals before it spoils; foreigners and Japanese communicating in broken phrases and gestures, sharing maps and guiding each other to embassy help desks; firefighters from out of town working side by side with local shopkeepers to clear rubble and check for survivors in collapsed homes.
In the darkness, Tokyo’s people have become the light for one another. There’s an unspoken understanding that we will get through this night – and this disaster – together.
Which parts of Tokyo will be destroyed, and which ones will survive
As the sun rose on July 6, the enormity of what had happened began to crystallize. The megaquake that struck Tokyo is now estimated at magnitude 7.5, its epicenter directly beneath the metropolitan area. But the devastation wasn’t evenly spread.
Tokyo’s unique geography and building patterns meant some areas were pulverized, while others, just a few kilometers away, emerged relatively intact. Recent seismic hazard models had predicted exactly this kind of uneven impact.
Eastern Tokyo, the traditional shitamachi lowlands,bore the worst of the quake’s wrath. Districts like Koto, Sumida, Taito, and Edogawa Wards, built on soft alluvial soil and even reclaimed land, experienced amplified shaking and liquefaction. Just as experts feared, the mud and landfill under these neighborhoods turned to jelly under the seismic waves. Streets cracked and undulated; in reclaimed areas near Tokyo Bay, the ground in some spots sank by over a meter, burping up groundwater and sand. Entire parking lots in Koto Ward looked like wavy funhouse floors.
In the Sumida Ward neighborhoods around the old Senso-ji temple and the shitamachi shopping streets, many older wooden structures collapsed or caught fire. Narrow alleys filled with rubble. It was here and in parts of Adachi and Arakawa Wards, areas densely packed with aging wooden houses, that firestorms raged in the quake’s aftermath, when gas stoves and kerosene heaters ignited hundreds of small blazes that merged into infernos. Fire modeling had long identified these wards as high-risk, and indeed they suffered the kinds of conflagrations not seen since 1923.
By contrast, western and central Tokyo fared comparatively better. The upscale high-rise districts built on more solid ground – for example Marunouchi, Shinjuku-West, and parts of Minato Ward – saw severe shaking but less structural collapse.
These areas sit atop the rocky Kanto loam plateau, which didn’t amplify the quake as much as the lowlands did. Skyscrapers in Shinjuku and Marunouchi (the financial district near Tokyo Station) largely withstood the quake, swaying but not toppling. Modern engineering saved them: Japan’s strict building codes (especially after the 1981 update and further refinements post-1995 and 2011) meant high-rises built in the last few decades were designed to sway, bend, and ride out quakes without catastrophic failure. Many of those buildings probably sustained internal damage – cracked walls, broken pipes, smashed windows – but they remained standing and will be repairable. Minato Ward’s business centers, like Roppongi and Toranomon, also saw their newer towers survive with minimal structural harm.
That said, even in these “safer” zones, pockets of destruction existed. Not every structure was new or quake-proof. In Setagaya Ward out west – a generally affluent area on firm ground – older wooden homes collapsed in some of the older neighborhoods, and a few mid-century apartment blocks built in the 1960s (before strict codes) partially crumbled.
Perhaps counterintuitively, one of the safest places in Tokyo during the quake turned out to be the airports and some coastal infrastructure. Haneda Airport’s runways buckled and cracked, yes, the reclaimed land beneath them settled unevenly, but the terminals themselves, built to high seismic standards on shock absorbers, sustained only light damage. As predicted by engineers, the airport’s structures didn’t collapse. Similarly, the Tokyo Skytree, though located in one of the hardest-hit wards (Sumida), survived with just cosmetic damage.
In summary, the quake’s footprint was a patchwork: low-lying eastern Tokyo and older wooden neighborhoods endured the brunt of destruction, while modern high-rise hubs on firmer ground emerged bruised but standing. It was a harsh demonstration of what Tokyo’s disaster planners have known for years – that where you are in the city, and how your building was constructed, can mean the difference between life and death in a megaquake.
How many people will die?
By the first week after the disaster, officials began to assemble a grim picture of the human toll. According to Japan’s Cabinet Office and Tokyo Metropolitan Government simulations, a direct hit earthquake of this scale had been expected to cause on the order of 10,000 to 20,000 deaths, and early estimates sadly fell in that range.
As of now, the death toll stands at approximately 12,300, with the number expected to rise further as rescue teams comb through collapsed structures and firefighters finally extinguish the last smoldering ruins. Over 200,000 people are injured, overwhelming hospitals that are themselves coping with quake damage and power outages. For a single city disaster, these numbers are staggering, yet experts note it could have been far worse.
In comparison, the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake killed an estimated 105,000 people in Tokyo and Yokohama when accounting for those missing – a toll nearly ten times higher.
The difference? Fire and building standards. In 1923, uncontrolled post-quake fires and flimsy wooden construction turned the city into a deadly tinderbox. In 2025, while fires were widespread, Tokyo’s firefighting response (and fire-resistant buildings) prevented the kind of citywide firestorm that razed entire wards in 1923.
That’s not to underplay the devastation. Infrastructure collapse added to the casualty count. Several older highway overpasses and bridges gave way, including a section of the Metropolitan Expressway in eastern Tokyo and at least two local road bridges that toppled into rivers. Cars and buses caught on those structures were mangled; dozens of motorists lost their lives in those moments.
The subway system, thankfully, was mostly evacuated quickly – all trains automatically stopped – but some stations suffered cave-ins or flooding from burst water mains. In one tragic incident, a ceiling collapse in an old under-river tunnel of the Tozai subway line led to over 50 fatalities. Train derailments on above-ground lines caused additional casualties, though again, automatic braking systems and improved train designs since the 2000s prevented disasters on the scale of past rail accidents.
Additionally, displacement and homelessness are at levels not seen in Japan’s postwar history. The latest figures indicate that around 1.5 million people have been displaced from their homes in the Tokyo region, either because their residences were destroyed by shaking/fire or because they are in high-risk buildings now deemed uninhabitable.
For context, that is roughly the population of a city like Philadelphia or Yokohama left seeking shelter. At least 500,000 housing units in and around Tokyo have been severely damaged or destroyed. Many of the displaced are staying in temporary shelters set up in school gymnasiums, open parks, and public facilities. Others have moved to stay with relatives in safer parts of the country. The government has already begun discussing long-term rehousing, knowing from experience in 2011 that temporary shelters can persist for months or years.
What a megaquake will do to Japan’s economy
While Tokyo’s people grapple with the human cost, economists and officials are already assessing the economic impact of this megaquake, and it’s daunting. The Japanese government’s early estimate pegs the direct damage (to buildings, infrastructure, and assets) at around ¥50 trillion (approximately $350 billion USD). To put that in perspective, that’s roughly 10% of Japan’s entire GDP, erased in minutes. For comparison, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake’s direct losses were around ¥17 trillion, and the 1995 Kobe quake about ¥10 trillion, and that’s just the immediate destruction.
The broader economic ripple effects are projected to at least double that figure. Economists note that when factoring in business interruption, supply chain disruptions, lost productivity, and market impacts, this disaster could end up costing on the order of ¥100 trillion ($700 billion) or more over the coming year.
In fact, one study by the Japan Society of Civil Engineers not long ago warned that a Tokyo direct-hit earthquake might eventually tally up to ¥1 quadrillion in economic losses over two decades, essentially a long-term drag as the region rebuilds and recovers. That number (a quadrillion yen) is about $7 trillion USD, akin to wiping out an economy the size of France over time.
Globally, markets are jittery. Japan is not only a major economy but a key player in finance. The Tokyo quake caused a temporary dive in global stock markets as investors feared supply chain breakdowns and companies like automakers and tech giants issued profit warnings due to the disruption. However, international confidence in Japan’s ability to bounce back, born from seeing it recover from past disasters, has kept outright panic at bay. Countries around the world, recognizing Japan’s crucial economic role, are offering support to minimize supply chain fallout. For example, tech firms in Taiwan and South Korea have vowed to help fulfill orders if Japanese factories remain offline, and oil exporters have assured Japan of energy supplies as some Japanese refineries shut down for safety inspections.
One stark lesson already being discussed in boardrooms: business continuity planning. Companies with data centers or critical operations solely in Tokyo are urgently seeking to diversify, the quake knocked out servers and networks for many firms. Those with cloud backups and secondary sites in Osaka or abroad managed to keep running. This could accelerate a trend of decentralizing certain functions away from Tokyo to mitigate future risks.
In summary, Japan’s economy has taken a historic blow, but not a fatal one. The coming months will test the nation’s resilience on the economic front. If history is any guide, the reconstruction of Tokyo, rebuilding thousands of homes, repairing infrastructure, and retrofitting the city to be even safer, could become an economic engine of its own. There will be tens of thousands of jobs in construction and engineering created by this tragedy. In the long run, Tokyo might emerge economically revitalized, much as Kobe did in the years after 1995 (and as Tokyo itself did after 1923).
The biggest lesson: Belief won’t save you, but preparation might
Tokyo’s megaquake of 2025 will be remembered as a day of terror and heroism, destruction and rebirth. It began shrouded in the eerie light of a manga prophecy, a work of speculative art that many dismissed as superstition – until it wasn’t. The fact that a cartoonist’s dream sent tourists running and people praying speaks to a very human instinct: to seek patterns and warnings even where science says there are none.
And yet, preparedness overpowered panic in the end. The true heroes of this story were not those who claimed to foresee the future, but those who prepared for an uncertain future: the engineers who fortified Tokyo’s skyscrapers, the disaster planners who stockpiled supplies and drafted response plans, the teachers who drilled children to shelter under desks at the first jolt, the community leaders who organized fast relief for neighbors. Their foresight, rooted in science, history, and solidarity, is what saved tens of thousands of lives.
If there is a kind of prophecy that Tokyo truly benefited from, it was the scientific prophecy of hazard models and simulations. Those models “predicted” in a sense what would happen: they showed which wards might burn, how many could be killed or injured, how infrastructure would fare. Because authorities took those models seriously, they strengthened building codes, ran training exercises, and educated the public. This disaster, as terrible as it is, would have been an even more colossal tragedy without those measures. In that context, a key lesson emerges: investment in preparedness pays off, massively.
Tokyo’s resilience has also highlighted the importance of community and trust. In a metropolis of 14 million, it could have been every person for themselves. Instead, we saw a city come together. People trusted the emergency alerts; they trusted each other to behave with civility and cooperation. Even as prophecy and rumor sowed some fear before the event, when the ground started shaking it was clear that rational action and compassion were the paths to survival, not blind fear.
For urban planners and leaders worldwide, Tokyo 2025 offers a trove of insights. Major cities from Los Angeles to Istanbul lie on restless faults and could face their own “big one.”
The broader lesson is that urban disaster planning cannot be complacent. Superstition and rumors will always swirl around disasters, but they must not distract from pragmatic preparation. Cities must plan for worst-case scenarios (no matter how unpleasant to imagine), run drills, enforce stringent building standards, and educate citizens continuously. The time to do that is now, not after tragedy strikes.
About the Data & Sources
Figures above combine:
Cabinet Office Tokyo Inland Earthquake simulations (2018 & 2022 updates) for casualty and fire-spread estimates.
Japan Society of Civil Engineers loss projections, adjusted to 2025 prices.
Historical damage records from the 1923 Great Kantō and 1995 Hanshin-Awaji quakes.
Real-time drills and emergency-response white papers from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, plus academic literature on urban liquefaction.
Travel-industry cancellation data sourced from April–May 2025 press briefings by Ctrip, Trip.com Group and the Japan National Tourism Organization.
I wish it does not happen…