In Setonaikai National Park, Japan, is Okunoshima (or, Rabbit Island) where I visited while cycling the Shiminami Kaido, a cycling route that crosses a chain of islands in the Setouchi inland sea. This blog provides an account of the island and the things that can be found there.
The route itself was calm and forgiving, passing through half abandoned fishing villages, and fields full of vividly sweet lemons and oranges. Kelp farmers returned in small boats from the shimmering inland sea. I rode from island to island on a freshly laid cycling path, over long bridges and quiet roads that wrapped around the rocky coasts. Every day was a bright and warm autumn, with a perfect blue sky and no wind.
I’d seen videos on youtube of an island where domesticated rabbits roam in hoards. It wasn’t until well after I’d planned and begun this trip that I realised I was riding very near to that exact place. It turned out to be a short detour from my cycling route, and a 20 minute ferry across to the island. I extended my bicycle hire by a day so that I could visit the rabbit island.
I arrived at the quiet ferry terminal on another bright, still day. Rabbit iconography and infrastructure began to appear as soon as I approached it. With my ferry ticket, I was able to buy a small bag of rabbit pellets from the station attendant. I felt silly, buying the pellets on my own as a solo tourist. Waiting with me were a young couple with a vlogging camera, and an energetic teenage boy who wasn’t wearing any shoes, each with a bag of rabbit pellets in hand.
A random piece of English text stood out on side of the ferry terminal: Love is a flower of soul. You are a flower of me.
On the ferry, the rules of rabbit island are explained:
‘Do not put your finger near the rabbit’s mouth.’
‘Do not pick up the rabbits.’
As expected. The third rule caught my attention:
‘Do not leave your pet rabbit on the island.’
This rule hurt to think about. It wasn't so much the abandonment of the rabbit that saddened me, but the image of anyone making the long journey here to this very quiet and remote place with a rabbit in their lap, preparing to let it go. But by another logic, it seemed like a good place for a rabbit to be left. (I would later learn that the rabbits were highly tribal, and would be unlikely to accept a new rabbit dumped from the mainland.)
My first hour on the island was blissful. I was struck by the sandy beaches, blue water and tranquility of the small, roadless island. I wondered if it was acceptable to swim at rabbit island. As soon as the ferry landed, the three other people who were on it dispersed, and I was on my own.
Sure enough, there were lots of rabbits, of all different sizes and colours. Mostly, they were quietly ambling in the shade, some standing and sniffing at my hands for pellets. It was not exactly like the videos I had seen, of a ground crawling with bunnies and crowds of people walking around. It was a lot more spacious and peaceful.
Adding to the serene and strange mood of the island, was an inexplicable saxophone player, howling directly out to sea from the shore of the beach, with a very smooth tone. I sat with the rabbits and listened for a while. Unsure whether this person was busking, simply practicing, or somehow involved in the operation of the island as a paid entertainer.
Near where the ferry landed, there were a number of camping platforms, where it seemed you could pay to pitch a tent and sleep among the rabbits. This tourist infrastructure felt overdone for an island with four or five people on it.
I followed the island around to the visitor centre, outside which was a very beautiful sculptural installation that invited you to step inside a giant pair of metal rabbit ears and listen. I tried to listen through the ears to make out the trailing sounds of the saxophone player.
Outside the visitor center, an American man approached me. He wore aviator sunglasses and a pink polo shirt. It was from him that I learnt the first dark truth about rabbit island. He spoke to me with a strange authority, for about 15 minutes, while I knelt and fed a small orange rabbit with a scar on its ear. I pulled out my phone to video the rabbit, sensing that this would be a conversation worth documenting.
“They’re not wild, you know? But this is the wild. No rabbit can ever leave the island, that’s a rule of the area. They don’t have any access to medics out here either. When you go up the hill, you’ll start to see the mountain rabbits. They’re not these cute ones that’ll come up to you. They don’t need the food. They know exactly how to survive around here. They have their own districts, you see. If one rabbit wanders into the wrong neighbourhood, it’ll get the crap beaten out of it.”
He pauses to look at the rabbit in front of us. “You’ve got some more scars now haven’t you? You’ve been up in the hills, yup.”
‘You’ve met before?’ I ask, confused.
“Oh yep, we come here every year from San Francisco, me and my wife. We’ve got an annual booking at the hotel. We come out here to protect and look after them. But it’s not a food problem, believe me, it’s something else. There used to be thousands of these guys.
“Huh?”
“The pigs. The farmers in the area have started an annual boar hunt, they started shootin at em. The minute the gun starts firing, mumma pig puts her babies on her back and swims out to this island. You can see it all on youtube. Recent years since the pandemic, the island has been crawling with pigs. Inoshishi is the Japanese name for them, we call them ‘wild pigs’ in America. The pigs ate all the food that people were dumping over by the ferry, so we were cleaning that up. At some point they started eating the rabbits. We bury a rabbit or two a day. Well what’s left of them. I don’t know if I believe in what we’re doing, burying them. The boars dig em up. Then the crows will get em too. Lotta crows getting in on the action. But you’ll notice there’s a lot less rabbits here than you might have expected. It’s all off balance.”
“Why come here, all the way from San Francisco?” I ask.
“Plain old human kindness. I don’t care if these guys are dogs, cats or rats. I love animals. I don’t believe in owning pets though. We come every year to be with the rabbits. They know me. Every morning when I step out, I just yell out - ‘Ohayo!’ and they come hopping. I fill up their water. Everyone here is riding the rabbit wave! You, me, the hotel, and the boars.”
“I didn’t know there was a hotel. Have you got rabbits in San Francisco?”
“You know, I don’t know.” says the American man. This surprised me.
“We see a lot of squirrels.”
The monologue leaves me perplexed. I picture the boars eating the rabbits. So there is a strange ecology developing on the island, with bags of pellets from the ferry terminal apparently at the base of the food chain. Even stranger than that, there’s a hotel here? He’s the fifth person I had seen all morning. Most of all, I was astonished by the committed, entirely self appointed responsibility that this man had taken for the rabbits. So much so that he flew here every year from San Francisco.
I thanked him for his stories, bought an iced drink from the visitor centre, and set off up the hill to check out the ‘mountain rabbits’ that he had described.
At the peak of rabbit island, was a star viewing machine, which when turned, would show the position of stars and planets in the night sky. Hopping around the base of the machine were the mountain rabbits, and yes, they looked different. More hare-like with longer legs, just as you would imagine. Bizzare.
A sign from the Ministry of the Environment warned against leaving leftover rabbit food on the ground. The sign had a picture of a blushing warthog pouncing on a crying rabbit.
Then, on one of those poles that gives directions and distances, I discovered the second dark truth about rabbit island.
‘Ōkunoshima poison gas museum.’
Stepping foot inside the museum, some missing pieces about the island began to fall into place. Namely, why there was no one here, when all of the surrounding islands were settled. It had been used for 16 years as a poison gas production facility, eventually destroyed in 1945 by U.S forces. The museum began with a description of poison gas.
‘A green gas which drifts silently into hollows and trenches. It displays strong toxicity, causing severe pain and blistering of the skin. When inhaled, it produces injuries all over the body.’
There was also a statement by the local government: ‘We hereby declare that war is meaningless, and the production of poison gas is tragic. This museum was built with the cooperation of the affected people and town.’
The display cabinets were full of protective gear and personal items belonging to the poison gas workers. There were barrels stained with chemicals, and various notebooks and manuals. It seemed that a large number of workers had become poisoned and died here, though the number was not listed. The museum was sad, both for the tragedy and because of the mundane nature of the items displayed.
Before the establishment of the poison gas facility, the island had been home to a fish processing and preservation plant that had brought money to the local area. During the war, the Japanese army went to great lengths to hide the island and its poison gas production, which had been made illegal under the Geneva convention.
In the corner of the museum, I saw an image of a row of rabbits, fixed by the neck into a long wooden jaw resembling old fashioned prisoner’s stocks. The english description read ‘Rabbits used for the testing of Chloride Aseto Phenon.’ This was the only mention of rabbits inside the museum. To me, this raised a very important question - were the rabbits of rabbit island the descendents of escaped testing subjects? The museum held no answers, so I pulled out my phone to google.
In a 2016 interview with Mr. Murakami, the former director of the poison gas museum, he stated that the many rabbits bred for testing were killed upon closing of the gas facility, and that a new population of rabbits had been released in the establishment of the island as a historical park, following the war. Other pages say that the rabbits were released by a group of schoolchildren in the 1970's.
This seemed extremely dubious to me. Why would a local government breed and release hundreds of rabbits in such a sombre historical site? Why would schoolchildren do the same? Or, had they left the testing rabbits of the poison gas program to take over the island, and made up this story to comfort visitors, who may worry about the safety of petting and feeding this isolated population of toxic bunnies.
There was no way to know. I took a map from the museum and walked around the island, now discovering all the sites of the gas production. The large concrete barrels for storage of chemicals, the many air raid shelters, and medical centre used to treat the worker’s health conditions. All of this was sad, almost brutalist concrete infrastructure falling to rubble as it was swallowed by the forest.
Eventually, I found myself at the hotel. On the lawn out the front, there were many small holes. A sign pointed to a pool, and a tennis court, and a long row of bikes were available for hire. The hotel was huge and empty, apart from a few people milling around in the ground floor cafe and gift shop. I looked at the menu, expecting some rabbit themed dishes, but it was plain and normal. I thought of the American man who came here every year and wondered what he ate. I thought of the workers of the old island. Do they still live in the surrounding area? What do they think of this place, a beautiful oasis for pampered bunnies, a smorgasbord for wild pigs and a strange, improvised ecology based on tourists and their pellets.
