Okunoshima
The rabbits don’t care what happened here. They swarm toward you on the paths, soft and reaching, dozens of them at once surging against your legs. You stand with a handful of feed and they’re warm and urgent, their mouths open. For a moment there’s nothing but the sound of them breathing and the weight of it against your skin.
Okunoshima is three kilometers off Hiroshima. It’s small, nothing special to look at. Now people take ferries out to see rabbits. In the 1940s the Japanese military used it as a testing ground for chemical and biological weapons. The rabbits they brought—they weren’t brought to live. After the war, when it was over, some soldiers left rabbits behind. Whether on purpose or by accident, nobody really knows. The rabbits bred. Now there are hundreds of them, maybe more, all descended from whatever it was that survived what they weren’t supposed to.
I don’t know if you’re supposed to think about that when you’re feeding them. The whole place is marketed as cute, as this soft escape. There’s a gift shop. There are schedules. Everyone comes with the same idea: see the rabbits, get covered in rabbits, film it. The rabbits are real and soft and completely unbothered by you. But it all sits on top of something else, something everyone ignores while they’re there.
Maybe that’s just how it works. Maybe every place you go has something underneath it you don’t think about. The island doesn’t owe you an acknowledgment of its past. The rabbits are living their lives. They’re not cute as a monument or a memorial—they’re just rabbits, eating what you give them, not thinking about poisons or what their ancestors survived.
But I couldn’t stop. Even with the weight of them around my ankles, the sun through the trees, I kept seeing it as this weird transformation, this place where something dark got quietly covered over with something soft. Maybe that’s the kindest thing. Maybe that’s just what history becomes when enough time passes and enough tourists show up. The rabbits don’t remember. They just eat and breed and swarm the next person who walks off the ferry.