Okunoshima: The unexpectedly wonderful island near Hiroshima

Last week, I went to Okunoshima (大久野島), a small island near Hiroshima that I have wanted to go to for a long time. Most Japanese people who know about this island call it Rabbit Island (ウサギ島) because there are hundreds of rabbits living on the island.

During World War Two, Okunoshima was chosen as the island that would be used to manufacture and test poisonous nerve gas. Because of the island’s remote location (it takes two hours by local train or bus from Hiroshima) and small size (You can ride around the entire island by bicycle in around three hours) it was an ideal location for making and testing the poisonous gas. They used to test the gas on rabbits. After the war ended, the workers on the island all left the island and before they left, they let all the rabbits out of their cages. That means that now, sixty years later, the island is absolutely covered in rabbits.This spring vacation, I wanted to go somewhere relaxing and fun in Japan but also somewhere with an interesting history and hardly any crowds. When my friend suggested we go to Okunoshima, I thought it was a great idea.

Most Japanese people don’t know about Okunoshima because it was not drawn on Japan’s map during WW2. Even now, it is so small and annoying to get to that hardly anyone ever goes. Almost nothing about how to get there is written in English, so that means that it is not a popular tourist attraction for foreign people. I imagine that Okunoshima gets busy in the springtime, but last week, my friends and I only saw 3 other small groups of people. We were almost alone on the island.

The island doesn’t have many people, but it has a ton of rabbits. If you buy some celery, lotus root or lettuce, hundreds of rabbits will come running at you. They don’t bite and they are tame, so you can pick them up and pet them as much as you like. They were like little dogs. I had never seen an affectionate rabbit before.On Okunoshima, there is a hotel, a hot springs resort, many tennis courts right next to the ocean, pools, bicycle rental and fields for playing sports. There are also hiking trails and fantastic old abandoned factories you can find. This abandoned building used to be a lightbulb factory. We also found old bomb shelters. Nobody else was there. It was great.There was a great museum about the history of the island as a poisonous gas manufacturing area. Many of the signs were in English, but some of the most interesting ones were not translated, so pay attention to the Japanese signs / get your friend to read them for you.

There are displays of the old gas masks and uniforms that workers used to wear. There are photos of the plants and descriptions about the various types of gases and what they can do. Japanese museum displays are much more graphic than they are back home, so be careful if you don’t want to see pictures of dead Kurdish children, horrific disfigurements, recent pictures of children affected by nerve gas during the wars in Iran/Iraq.

There is an entire display devoted to peace in the future and letters written by children about how much they wish that people would stop making biochemical weapons. Here is a picture of me walking around in an abandoned factory on the island.Okunoshima has a great message of peace, a chilling history, adorable rabbits, incredible abandoned buildings to take pictures of, and a lot of nature with no crowds. For those reason, I’d recommend going there.