The Island That Owes Its Rabbits Everything

During the Second World War, the Japanese military used Ōkunoshima—a small island about three kilometers off the coast of Hiroshima Prefecture—as a site for manufacturing and testing chemical weapons. Rabbits were among the test subjects. When the war ended and orders came down to destroy the facilities and kill the animals, some soldiers couldn’t do it. They released the rabbits onto the island instead and walked away.

Several generations later, Ōkunoshima belongs to them. Hundreds of tame rabbits of every color and size now cover the paths and meadows, and the tourists who make the short ferry crossing arrive loaded with pellets and vegetables and end up chased down the footpaths by a moving tide of ears and twitching noses. There’s a resort hotel. There’s also a poison gas museum, which I imagine most visitors walk past on their way to the rabbit meadow without stopping.

There’s something genuinely moving about this. The rabbits didn’t forgive anyone—they don’t have that architecture. But the place itself seems to have processed something over the decades. The worst thing that ever happened here became the condition for something gentle and slightly ridiculous. You can’t engineer that kind of redemption. It just accumulates, slowly, through reproduction and tourist yen and time.