Island hoppers Rabbits facing fragile future in Japanese 'paradise

The bunny-ear designs on the window aside, there is little to indicate that the ferry has arrived on an island teeming with rabbits.

- Justin McCurry Okunoshima

Then, moments after the passengers disembark, there is activity in the undergrowth. A single rabbit scampers out, wholly untroubled by its two-legged visitors. And then another.

A short walk along the coast takes visitors deep into rabbit territory on Okunoshima, one of 3,000 islands in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. Half a dozen of the animals chase away another as it attempts to join them in a communal meal of Chinese cabbage.

The scene unfolds in front of smiling, camera-toting tourists barely able to believe their proximity to Okunoshima’s fabled - but troubled - furry residents.

The two grey rabbits that greeted the ferry from the mainland return to bushes stripped of their leaves. Shallow bowls of water left by volunteers dot the island in places where its estimated 400500 rabbits tend to congregate in expectation of pellets of food left by visitors in the absence of their natural diet of fallen leaves, bark, roots and grass.

For all its natural beauty and popularity as a tourist destination, Okunoshima - uninhabited except for staff working at the solitary hotel and its guests - faces an uncertain future, and so do its fourlegged inhabitants.

From 1929 until the end of the second world war, the island hosted poisonous gas research and production facilities run by the Japanese imperial army.

The operation was so secret that Okunoshima was not included in contemporary maps of Japan.

Workers in rubber uniforms, gloves, long boots and gas masks manufactured mustard gas, and smaller quantities of teargas and cyanide.

The manufacture of weapons of chemical warfare - which was not exposed until the 1980s - also marked the beginning of the island’s connection to rabbits.