A legend that postdates the incident it explains
The Devil's Sea, ma no umi in Japanese, also sold as the Dragon's Triangle, the Formosa Triangle and the Pacific Bermuda Triangle, is a stretch of the Pacific south of Tokyo. It appears on no official map, and its edges move from one author to the next. Skeptoid's version runs from Taiwan up to Miyake-jima and across to about Iwo Jima, along the Izu-Bonin arc of undersea volcanoes and islands. The Japanese phrase itself is ordinary; it means devil sea, troublesome sea or dangerous sea, and has been used for many hazardous waters.
The legend has two roots. In January 1955 the ship Shinyo Maru No. 10 lost radio contact near Mikura-jima, and Japanese newspapers called the area ma no umi until she was found safe on 15 January. The Yomiuri Shimbun mapped nine ships lost there in five years, and the New York Times passed the story on as the Devil's Sea, where ships vanished in perfect weather. Then in 1971 and 1972 Ivan T. Sanderson wrote about twelve vile vortices, triangles spaced around the globe, one of them here. Charles Berlitz, who worked at Sanderson's estate, put the Devil's Sea into The Bermuda Triangle in 1974 and followed it with The Dragon's Triangle in 1989. Skeptoid's Brian Dunning found no earlier book on the region, though the 1955 coverage shows the name at least was older.
The most famous loss was real. Myōjin-shō, a submarine volcano about 450 kilometres south of Tokyo, erupted from 1952 to 1953, raising a small island and drowning it again. On 24 September 1952 the survey ship Kaiyo Maru No. 5, of the Hydrographic Department of the Maritime Safety Agency, was destroyed by the volcano with her crew of 31, nine of them scientists studying the eruption. Berlitz recast her as a ship of 100 sent in 1955 to investigate the disappearances.
For his 1975 book Larry Kusche wrote to the offices concerned, and nobody knew of a Devil's Sea; the only area ships were warned off was 10 miles around Myōjin-shō. Most of the nine lost ships were small fishing boats with poor radios or none, the weather had not been perfect, and two of them went down about 750 miles apart. Berlitz's lost military vessels turned out to be fishing boats, lost at the usual rate for those waters. After the Kaiyo Maru, the Hydrographic Department built Manbou, the Sunfish, an unmanned radio-controlled boat for surveying waters like these.
South of Tokyo, Japan
See it on the map
This is remote ground. The closest other places on the map are a long way off.
