It goes by many names: the Devil's Sea, the Dragon's Triangle, and the Taiwan Triangle; and, just as is the Bermuda Triangle, it's even sometimes called the Devil's Triangle. Its location varies a bit depending on which author you read, but the triangle usually runs from Taiwan up to the volcanic island of Miyake-jima just south of Tokyo, to about Iwo-jima or thereabouts. Miyake-jima and Iwo-jima lie along the Izu-Bonin volcanic arc, a line of underwater volcanoes and islands that's part of a system stretching 2500 kilometers from Japan to Guam. Some, like Charles Berlitz, say that the Devil's Sea is every bit as dangerous and mysterious as the Bermuda Triangle.
In his 1989 book The Dragon's Triangle, Berlitz said that Japan lost five military vessels in the area between 1952 and 1954 alone, with a loss of some 700 sailors. In Dan Cohen's 1974 book Curses, Hexes, & Spells it's reported that legends of the danger of the Devil's Sea go back for centuries in Japan. Its most famous casualty was the No. 5 Kaiyo-Maru, a scientific research vessel, which disappeared with the loss of all hands on September 24, 1953 (a date often wrongly reported as 1952 or 1958).
With such a dramatic history, you'd expect there to be all sorts of books on the subject, especially in Japan. But it turns out that the eager researcher is disappointed. A search for books, newspaper, or magazine articles on the Devil's Sea comes up completely empty, until a full 20 years after the loss of the Kaiyo-Maru. Apparently, the story — even the very existence of this legendary named region — was not invented until very recently.
Enter cryptozoologist and paranormal enthusiast Ivan T. Sanderson, well known for his Bigfoot searches, but perhaps not as well known for his Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, New Agers and other paranormalists would hang out at Sanderson's estate, nicknamed The Farm, and read, write, and research. In his group's newsletter Pursuit in April of 1971, Sanderson wrote of something he called "vile vortices", twelve spots around the globe that he believed could be portals to another dimension. In 1972, the article was reprinted in Saga magazine under the title "The Twelve Devil's Graveyards Around the World". In addition to the north pole and the south pole, Sanderson proposed ten triangles circling the globe, all the same size, shape, and orientation as the Bermuda Triangle. Five, including the Bermuda Triangle, are supposedly spaced equidistantly around the Tropic of Cancer (about 23.5° N) and the other five staggered between them along the Tropic of Capricorn (about 23.5° S). The Devil's Sea is another of the five northern triangles, with another enclosing the volcanoes of Hawaii.
