To date, the island hosts Kyukamura Ōkunoshima Hotel, along with a golf course and the gas museum. Photograph by Bernard Hoffman, The LIFE Picture Collection, Getty Images The bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed about 70,000 people immediately another 70,000 were injured, and thousands more have since died as a result of radiation exposure. HIROSHIMA, late 1945-The twisted wreckage of a theatre lurches above rubble some 900 yards from the epicenter of the explosion. Seventeen thousand of those tourists were from outside Japan. ![]() She says the popularity of the bunny "stampede" video shifted the composition of the tourists from elderly Japanese people ( drawn to the island's hot springs) and local school children ( brought on fieldtrips to the poison gas museum) to a wider demographic. "It really is a recent phenomenon."ĭeMello and other researchers visited the island for 10 days in March 2015 to study the rabbit communities and interview people. "What you have is too many rabbits for such a small island," says Margo DeMello, president of the California-based rabbit rescue group House Rabbit Society. Estimates vary, but about 300 rabbits inhabited the island in 2007, which grew to between 700 and 1,000 today. Rumors abound that a British couple brought the bunnies to the island, or a nearby school released them in 1971. But experts say the test rabbits were euthanized after operations shut down. Rabbits were brought to the island as test subjects for the chemical weapons, and some people speculate the animals there now are descendants of the originals. The infamous locale was sometimes called "Poison Gas Island" and it was erased from Japanese maps to keep the operation under wraps. No one really knows how the rabbits got to the island in the first place.Īround 1929, the Japanese government secretly tested poison gas on Ōkunoshima. But with high human interference, the island is not sustainable for the animals. ![]() Since then, other social media and clips showing swarms of rabbits have drawn visitors to the island. Not many can call this tourist attraction home, save the hundreds of feral European rabbits that roam the island.ĭubbed "Rabbit Island," Ōkunoshima has become more popular since 2014, when a video of a woman being stampeded by bunnies went viral. The terrain is grassy, dotted with a beach resort, nature lookouts, and piers. It's a little more than two and a half miles around, which can be walked in about an hour and a half. Ōkunoshima is a small island nestled in the Inland Sea of Japan.
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