In 1973, Tsutomu Goto’s book “The Great Prophecy of Nostradamus” was published and became a bestseller, in which he introduced the prophecy that Nostradamus predicted that the human race would be destroyed by the “Great Pumpkin” in the “seventh month of 1999” with anecdotes invented to increase its credibility. At the time, this prophecy was a simple and simple idea. At the time, many young people naively believed in this prophecy, and it has been pointed out that it had no small influence on the Aum Shinrikyo Incident. In fact, Aum Shinrikyo published a book claiming to have deciphered Nostradamus’ prophecy in order to gain followers. From this point until 1999, books on Nostradamus were published almost every year, and there were several major booms: in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Gotoh’s first sequel appeared; in 1990-1991, when Iraq invaded Kuwait; and in 1998-1999, when the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait took place. There were also several major booms. In 1991, in particular, the Nostradamus book occupied the top three places in the “New Books and Nonfiction” category of Tohan’s bestseller rankings for that year… The Nostradamus phenomenon in Japan was extremely short-lived compared to the English, French, and German-speaking worlds (practically limited to the period 1973-1999, during which time more than 200 books were published), and is unique in that, for all the number of publications, it has not received sufficient empirical research or even the commonly held interpretations of its Western followers. The book is unique in that it has never been subjected to empirical research or even the commonly held interpretations of its Western adherents. [Nostradamus phenomenon - Wikipedia https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%8E%E3%82%B9%E3%83%88%E3%83%A9%E3%83%80%E3%83%A0%E3%82%B9%E7%8F%BE%E8%B1%A 1]

I think a “by singularity to extinction event” type of rumor will definitely spread.

  • existential risk, too, causes a composition of people who are thinking straight, people who make a lot of noise without thinking, and people who are annoyed by those who make a lot of noise.

This page is auto-translated from /nishio/日本におけるノストラダムス現象 using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.