Pacific Ring of Fire's Danger Zone
The Devil's Sea, or Dragon's Triangle, is an area of the Pacific Ocean south of Tokyo, roughly between the Izu Islands and the Ogasawara Islands. Its reputation was popularized in the 1970s and 1980s by American author Charles Berlitz, who connected it to the Bermuda Triangle. The region sits directly on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a zone of intense tectonic activity. The Philippine Sea Plate is actively subducting beneath the Eurasian Plate at a rate of at least 4 centimeters per year, creating significant undersea volcanic and seismic events. This geological instability is the main source of the area's verifiable hazards.
One of the most cited incidents is the disappearance of the Japanese research vessel Kaiyo Maru No. 5 on September 24, 1952. The ship, with 31 crew and scientists aboard, was dispatched to investigate the eruption of an undersea volcano, Myōjin-shō. Debris from the vessel was later found, and the official cause of its loss was determined to be the volcanic eruption. Many of the other vessels reported lost by Berlitz were small fishing boats, often with poor or no radio equipment, that succumbed to the region's notoriously severe weather, which includes sudden storms and typhoons.