The Devil's Sea / Dragon's Triangle
25°N, 142°E (approx. center)
Western Pacific — region of the Philippine Sea south of Japan, approximately bounded by Tokyo (Honshu), Iwo Jima, and Guam
[from the public record]
25.0000, 142.0000 · view on OpenStreetMap →
What's documented
The Devil's Sea (Ma-no Umi in Japanese) is a region of the western Pacific Ocean south of the Japanese archipelago, approximately bounded by Tokyo, Iwo Jima, and Guam. The Japanese government formally designated portions of the area as a danger zone in 1950 following the loss of the No. 5 Kaiyo-maru, a research vessel investigating an underwater volcanic disturbance south of Mikura Island, on 24 September 1952 with all 31 crew. The Devil's Sea overlaps with the seismically and volcanically active Bonin Arc and the Izu-Ogasawara Trench. The 'Dragon's Triangle' framing — a Pacific analog to the Bermuda Triangle, with a comparable pattern of unexplained vessel and aircraft disappearances — was popularized in Western literature by Charles Berlitz in *The Dragon's Triangle* (Wynwood, 1989). Lloyd's of London and the Japanese Coast Guard do not classify the region as anomalously dangerous beyond what its volcanic and seismic activity already accounts for. The Berlitz framing has been substantially challenged — most notably by skeptic Larry Kusche, whose work on the Bermuda Triangle also debunked several of Berlitz's Pacific cases. The region's geographic pairing with Bermuda in the popular imagination is itself a documented cultural fact.