The Dragon's Triangle (Devil's Sea)

A supposed danger zone near Japan, also called the Devil's Sea, promoted by the writer Berlitz in his 1989 book The Dragon's Triangle. Larry Kusche traced the legend to a 1955 New York Times article and found nothing unusual behind the losses.

Japanese Wikipedia says Larry Kusche, who had investigated the Bermuda Triangle, found what appears to be the original form of this legend in a New York Times article of 16 January 1955. He published the finding in his 1975 book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved, issued in Japan as 魔の三角海域. English Wikipedia adds that Kusche wrote to government offices connected with the sea, and none of them knew of a Devil's Sea or any such danger area. The real warning zone, set by Japan's Maritime Safety Agency, covered only 10 miles around the Myōjin-shō reef.

That reef was the site of a real disaster. The Japan Meteorological Agency's record of the Beyonesu Rocks says an undersea eruption began on 17 September 1952, and the erupting shoal was named Myōjin-shō. A new island a little over a hundred metres wide and some tens of metres high rose amid large explosions, then sank on 23 September. On 24 September the Kaiyo Maru No. 5, a Hydrographic Department vessel surveying the eruption, was lost, and 31 people aboard died in the course of their duties. The agency records the island rising again around 11 October and a third time around 5 April 1953.

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid reports that Kusche, writing in Skeptical Inquirer, also checked the Japanese vessels that the author Berlitz cited in his 1989 book The Dragon's Triangle. According to Dunning, what Berlitz called military ships were fishing boats, sinking no more often than fishing boats around Japan always have.