Shark Attacks in Japan

Why Japan's shark record is short, old and concentrated in a few seas

Japan stretches from subarctic Hokkaido to subtropical Okinawa, and its sharks change with the latitude. The cold Sea of Japan and the Pacific north are salmon shark, spiny dogfish and sleeper shark country, species that do not bite people. The warm Kuroshio Current running up the Pacific side of Kyushu, Shikoku and Honshu carries blue sharks, makos, hammerheads and, from time to time, great whites into the coastal waters of Wakayama, Aichi and Shizuoka. And the Ryukyu chain, from Amami down to Miyako and Yaeyama, is coral-reef habitat where tiger sharks and reef sharks are normal residents.

The record maps onto that geography. The old fatal cases are almost all in two enclosed bodies of water on the southern side of the main islands, the Seto Inland Sea between Honshu and Shikoku, and Ariake Bay on Kyushu, where large sharks entered warm, shallow, heavily used waters in mid-summer. The 1990s cluster belongs to the white shark, which hunts along the Pacific edge of Shikoku and the Atsumi Peninsula and met commercial shellfish divers working the bottom. The recent cases belong to surfers in the Kuroshio surf zones and to Okinawa.

Two more things shape the numbers. First, a large share of the entries are not bites on bathers: 7 of the 36 involve fishing vessels and crews, and 14 record no activity at all, because many older Japanese cases reached the international files as bare newspaper notes. Second, reporting from Japan has always been thin in the English-language databases, so the record probably understates minor incidents while capturing the deaths. With tens of millions of beach visits a year, Japan's rate of serious shark injury is among the lowest in the Pacific.

Where shark incidents have happened in Japan

Seven regions hold the record. The Seto Inland Sea alone accounts for nearly a third of it.

• Matsuyama and the Ehime coast (Seto Inland Sea)The heart of the 1990s cluster. Between January and June 1992 the waters around Matsuyama produced five entries: a survivor in January, a pen-shell diver whose steel helmet was bitten three times by a five-metre shark in February, a diver for pen shells killed on 8 March by a white shark of about five metres identified by the ichthyologist K. Nakaya, an unhurt yellowtail fisherman at Nagahama-cho the same day, and a boat off Igata-cho bitten repeatedly in June, leaving two white shark teeth in the keel. A survivor at Iyo in March 1993, possibly involving a white shark, closed the series.
• Okayama and Kagawa (northern Seto Inland Sea)The 1950s fatalities. A person died at Ushimado in July 1955 in an incident attributed to a blue shark, another at the same place in July 1959 with a bite to the right thigh, a swimmer at Saidaiji lost a leg to surgical amputation in August 1964, and a person was killed at Sakaide on the Kagawa side in August 1967.
• Ariake Bay and the Kyushu coastsA swimmer was killed in Ariake Bay in July 1950 and another person died there, on the Kumamoto shore, in August 1982. Nearby, a body was found in the stomach of a 2,000-pound white shark in Omura Bay, Nagasaki, in 1954, though the record does not confirm the shark caused the death, and a person survived an incident at Tatsugo-cho in Kagoshima Prefecture in 1994.
• Wakayama and the Kii PeninsulaA swimmer at Isonoura Beach, Wakayama City, was killed by a three-metre blue shark in August 1959, one of the few Japanese deaths with a clear species. In July 2004 a 3.5-metre, 350-kilogram longfin mako leapt aboard the squid trawler Shikishima-Maru off Susami and broke a crewman's ribs with its tail.
• Aichi, Shizuoka and Kochi (the Kuroshio surf coast)A scuba diver collecting bivalves off the Atsumi Peninsula in Aichi was killed by a six-metre white shark in April 1995, the last confirmed white shark death in Japan. The same peninsula saw a surfer bitten on the arm in June 2014, and surfers were bitten on the leg at Irino Beach in Kochi in July 2016 and on the ankle and feet at Iwata City in Shizuoka in September 2017.
• Okinawa and the Ryukyu IslandsThe newest and the oldest modern cases. A snorkeller was killed at Nago on 4 July 2022, the only fatal entry since 1995. In January 2014 a person in the water after a sea disaster off Miyako Island received a five-centimetre bite to the foot, and in September 1945 crew of the American minesweeper USS YMS-350, lost in a typhoon off the Ryukyus, were killed while swimming for shore.
• Tokyo's islands and Tokyo BayA fisherman was killed at Mikura-jima in the Izu Islands, 150 miles south of Tokyo, in August 1955; a person survived an incident in the Ogasawara Islands in 1988; and in 1862 the boat of a Hawaiian brig was stove in by a whale in the Bonin Islands with fatal results. In Tokyo Bay in 2008 a captive goblin shark tried to bite a diver's arm, a provoked case with no injury.

Every recorded shark incident in Japan

The statistics, the decade chart and the tables that follow are drawn live from the SharkSider database, which compiles the International Shark Attack File, the Global Shark Attack File and verified Japanese reports and is updated each week. Fatal rows are highlighted. The full Japanese record fits in a single table, newest first, with the four pre-1900 and undated entries at the foot.

• Recorded incidents36 (32 since 1900)
• Fatal14
• Years covered1862–2022
• Since 20008 incidents, 1 fatal
• Most common activityOther / not stated
• Most identified sharkWhite shark

The most recent incidents

• 4 July 2022 · Nago, OkinawaSnorkeling — FatalShark not identified · fatal
• 3 September 2017 · Iwata City, Shizuoka PrefectureSurfing — Injury to ankle & feetShark not identified · not fatal
• 24 July 2016 · Irino Beach, Kochi PrefectureSurfing — Lacerations to left legShark not identified · not fatal
• 23 December 2014Diving / filming — No injury, shark snagged its teeth in diver's suitShark: Goblin shark · not fatal
• 8 June 2014 · Aichi, Atsumi peninsulaSurfing — Left arm bittenShark not identified · not fatal
• 4 January 2014 · Off Miyako Island, Okinawa PrefectureSea disaster — 5 cm bite to left footShark not identified · not fatal

Every recorded incident

Reading the Japanese table takes some care, because it is a record of very uneven quality. Of the 14 fatal rows, three are not shark bites in the ordinary sense: the 1945 minesweeper crew were survivors of a typhoon, the 1862 Bonin Islands entry is a boat wrecked by a whale, and the undated row is an archaeological find, the oldest evidence of a shark death anywhere in the database. The 1954 Omura Bay and 1958 Mito rows are bodies recovered from sharks with no proof that the shark killed the person, so they are not counted as fatal. Three rows are marked questionable or doubtful, all in the Sea of Japan and Hokkaido, at Okushiri in 1959, an unplaced 1989 case and Kanazawa in 1992. Two are provoked: a tuna crewman bitten on the knee by a shark trapped in the net 460 miles off Iwakuni in 1998, and the captive goblin shark in Tokyo Bay in 2008. And 14 rows carry no activity at all (a fifteenth, the 1895 seal hunter, fits no category), which is why "other / not stated" heads the activity summary above.

In the species column the blue shark appears in 3 rows, the goblin shark in 2 and the longfin mako in 1; the great white is named outright in the 1992 boat-biting case and as a possibility at Iyo in 1993, and appears with a size in front of the name in the two 1990s diving deaths; the 1954 Omura Bay row mentions a white shark only in its injury note. More than half of the entries name no shark.

The sharks behind Japan's incidents

Great white shark. Responsible for the two best-documented deaths in the record, the pen-shell diver at Matsuyama in March 1992 and the bivalve diver off the Atsumi Peninsula in April 1995, and for the string of boat and helmet bites around Ehime in 1992. Japanese white sharks are a well-studied population that follows the Kuroshio and enters the Seto Inland Sea, and the animals involved were large, five and six metres by the record's estimates. Both fatal cases were commercial divers working the sea floor, breathing from surface-supplied hookah or scuba, which is a very different exposure from a swimmer on a beach. Our great white shark profile covers the species in depth.

Blue shark. The most frequently named species, tied to the 1950s swimming deaths at Ushimado in 1955 and 1959 and Isonoura Beach in 1959, the last of them a three-metre animal. The blue shark is abundant in the Kuroshio and the Inland Sea in summer, and while it is rarely dangerous, the 1950s Japanese cases are among the very few fatal blue shark bites recorded anywhere.

Longfin mako and goblin shark. The 2004 Susami entry is one of the only records of a longfin mako injuring a person, and it did so by leaping into the boat and hitting a crewman with its tail, not by biting. The two goblin shark entries, a captive animal in Tokyo Bay in 2008 and a filmed diver whose suit snagged on the shark's teeth in December 2014, are curiosities: this deep-sea species is known from Japanese waters more than anywhere else and is harmless to people.

Unidentified sharks in Okinawa. The 2022 Nago fatality and the 2014 Miyako bite name no species. Okinawa's reefs are home to tiger sharks, bull sharks and several reef sharks, and the record simply does not say which was involved. For every species found in Japanese waters, from the Japanese angelshark to the salmon shark of the north, see our page on sharks in Japan.

Staying safe in Japanese waters

The record points to three distinct risk settings, and each has its own rule.

• Commercial and recreational divers on the Pacific side of Shikoku and central Honshu carry the only historical white shark risk. Both 1990s deaths were divers working the bottom for shellfish in Ehime and Aichi, and the 1992 helmet and boat bites came from the same waters. Diving in pairs, using a tender boat that can pull a diver out fast, and suspending work when a large shark is reported nearby are the practical answers.
• Swimmers in the Seto Inland Sea and Ariake Bay were the victims of the 1950s and 1960s deaths, all in July and August, the warmest months. The last death in those waters was at Ariake Bay in 1982, with no activity recorded. Keep to guarded beaches and leave the water when a closure is called.
• Surfers on the Kuroshio coast account for the 2014, 2016 and 2017 injuries in Aichi, Kochi and Shizuoka, all single bites to a limb, none serious. Avoid surfing at dawn and dusk near river mouths and fishing ports, and get out if bait fish are schooling around you.
• Snorkellers in Okinawa should treat the 2022 Nago death as the reminder it is: stay inside the reef, snorkel in groups, avoid murky water after rain and never swim near fishing activity or fish cleaning.
• Anglers and crews should remember that a shark on deck or in the net is the most common way to get hurt in this record, from the 1998 tuna net bite to the 2004 mako that broke a man's ribs.

If a shark does approach, our guide to how to survive a shark attack explains how to hold your position, keep the animal in view and get back to the boat or reef without triggering a chase.

Japan in the Pacific and global picture

The International Shark Attack File confirms about 60 to 80 unprovoked bites worldwide in a typical year, and Japan is usually absent from the list. Its 36 entries over 160 years amount to fewer than one recorded incident every four years, and only 8 of them since 2000. That puts Japan far below Australia and the United States, and behind Pacific neighbours with warm-water reef sharks such as the Philippines. It sits closer to South Korea, whose few cases also involve white sharks and shellfish divers in the Yellow Sea, and to China and Russia, where the records are thin. What distinguishes Japan is the fatality rate: 14 deaths in 36 entries, because the record captured the serious cases and missed the trivial ones. The shark attacks overview compares every country we cover.

Related records in East Asia and the Pacific

Across the Sea of Japan, South Korea has its own white shark cases, and Russia covers the Sea of Japan's northern shore. To the south, the Philippines and Hong Kong show what warm-water records look like, and Guam covers the Mariana Islands south of the Ogasawaras. For the animals themselves, our sharks in Japan page lists the species from Hokkaido to Okinawa.

Written and reviewed by

SharkSider Editorial Team

A small team focused on researching sharks and making marine biology easy to understand. Every page is reviewed against current species records and the SharkSider attack database, and updated when new incidents or research appear.

Published August 19, 2023 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · 36 records for Japan in the SharkSider attack database (14 fatal), updated weekly.