The Myōjin-shō underwater volcano erupting in September 1952, photographed three days after the eruption destroyed the survey ship Kaiyo Maru No. 5

The Devil’s Sea

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South of Tokyo, in the western Pacific, lies a stretch of ocean the Japanese call ma no umi. The phrase translates as devil sea, troublesome sea or dangerous sea, and it has been used for dangerous waters around the world. In the 1970s it acquired a new life in English as the Devil’s Sea — also called the Dragon’s Triangle, the Formosa Triangle and the Pacific Bermuda Triangle — a place where ships supposedly vanished without explanation.

The legend has a founding story, and the founding story is true. The legend built on top of it is mostly not.

Nine Ships and a Bestseller

The Devil’s Sea entered English in 1974, in Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle, a book that became a global bestseller by collecting Atlantic disappearances into a single narrative of supernatural geography. Berlitz claimed that nine modern ships and several hundred crew members had vanished without explanation in the Devil’s Sea between 1950 and 1954. He wrote that in 1955 the Japanese government had sent the research vessel Kaiyo Maru No. 5 to investigate these mysterious losses, and that the ship had vanished as well, carrying over a hundred people. He added that the Japanese authorities had subsequently declared the entire region a danger zone.

Almost none of that was accurate. In 1975, a reference librarian at Arizona State University named Larry Kusche published a direct response, The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved, and took the Devil’s Sea apart piece by piece. The Kaiyo Maru No. 5 carried 31 people, not over a hundred. It was not sent in 1955 to investigate mysterious disappearances. It was sent in 1952 to study an erupting underwater volcano, and the volcano destroyed it. The danger zone the Japanese government designated covered only a small area — a 10-mile radius around the Myōjin-shō seamount — not a vast triangle of inexplicable paranormal activity. Most of the nine ships Berlitz listed were small fishing boats with poor or no radio, and some of them sank outside the area the legend defines. In 1995 Kusche noted that Berlitz’s “military vessels” were in fact fishing vessels.

Berlitz pushed further anyway. In 1989 he published The Dragon’s Triangle, adding more incidents and expanding the mythology considerably. The name stuck, and the Devil’s Sea joined the Bermuda Triangle in the popular imagination as one of the world’s cursed waters.

The Ship and the Volcano

The real story is dramatic enough without embellishment. Myōjin-shō sits about 450 kilometres south of Tokyo on the Izu–Ogasawara Ridge. Its name comes from a fishing boat, the No. 11 Myōjin-Maru of Yaizu, whose crew witnessed the great eruption of 1952. The Kaiyo Maru No. 5 belonged to the Hydrographic Department of Japan’s Maritime Safety Agency. On 24 September 1952, while the ship was operating above the crater to measure an eruption that was reshaping the seabed in real time, the volcano erupted again and destroyed the vessel. All 31 scientists and crew aboard were lost, including nine scientists studying the eruption. Debris from the ship was later recovered.

The eruption was loud enough to cross an ocean. United States Navy listening stations at Point Sur and Point Arena in California picked up strong underwater signals in the SOFAR channel, the deep sound layer that carries noise over huge distances. Researchers later matched those recordings to the eruptions and used them to pin down the most likely moment the survey ship was destroyed. The Kaiyo Maru did not vanish without a trace. It sailed toward a known danger on purpose, and the danger killed it.

Where the Legend Came From

The phrase ma no umi attached itself to the waters south of Tokyo in January 1955. On 4 January that year, the Japanese ship Shinyo Maru No. 10 lost radio contact near Mikura-jima. Japanese newspapers began to label the location as ma no umi — and kept doing so until the ship was found safe on 15 January. In the meantime, the Yomiuri Shimbun printed a map marking several other ships lost in recent years and said they had gone down inside an area the Yokohama Coast Guard Office treated as a special danger zone, running from the Izu islands to east of the Ogasawara islands, about 200 miles east to west and 300 miles north to south.

The New York Times picked up the story and introduced the incident with the term “The Devil’s Sea”, reporting that nine ships had been lost in the area within five years. The label, once printed, proved hard to remove. In 1972 the writer Ivan Sanderson included the region among his “twelve vile vortices” — supposedly anomalous zones distributed around the globe — and Berlitz gave it a triangle two years later.

The Devil’s Sea is a case study in how a legend is assembled: a real tragedy, a newspaper map, a catchy name in a foreign language, and a bestselling book that rearranged the facts into a pattern. The ships were real. The volcano was real. The triangle was drawn afterwards, by writers.

What Is Documented, and What Is Not

Documented: The Japanese phrase ma no umi (devil sea, troublesome sea, dangerous sea) was applied to waters south of Tokyo in January 1955, after the Shinyo Maru No. 10 lost radio contact near Mikura-jima (the ship was found safe on 15 January). The research vessel Kaiyo Maru No. 5 was destroyed by an eruption of the Myōjin-shō undersea volcano on 24 September 1952, with the loss of all 31 people aboard, including nine scientists; debris was recovered. Charles Berlitz introduced the Devil’s Sea to English readers in The Bermuda Triangle (1974) and expanded it in The Dragon’s Triangle (1989). Larry Kusche debunked the central claims in The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved (1975).

Unverified or disputed: That nine modern ships and several hundred crew vanished without explanation in the region between 1950 and 1954; that the Kaiyo Maru No. 5 carried over 100 people or was sent in 1955 to investigate mysterious losses; that Japan declared a vast triangular danger zone; that the region has any paranormal character. Government offices related to the sea had no record of a danger zone called the Devil’s Sea.

Sources

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