Japan’s ‘rabbit island’ has become symbolic of the overtourism plaguing the country | Canada Voices

The tiny island of Okunoshima, off the coast of Japan’s Hiroshima prefecture, attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year who come to feed, frolic and take photos with the hundreds of rabbits who call it home.

Overtourism and overfeeding has created a population of rabbits so large they have essentially stripped Okunoshima of almost all edible vegetation, leaving them completely dependent on food brought by visitors, piles of which can be seen dumped by tourists heading for the ferry home.

The same is true of the island’s growing population of wild boar, which have started displaying behaviour almost never seen in nature.

“They hunt the rabbits − it was very surprising to us,” said Shingo Kaneko, an expert on conservation ecology at Fukushima University. “Wild boar are not carnivores. They eat a large variety of food, including scavenging on dead bodies, but they never usually hunt.”

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Rabbits would not normally go near boar, which are endemic to Japan and likely came to Okunoshima by swimming from the mainland at some point. But because both species have grown accustomed to eating the food laid out by tourists, the rabbits appear to have lost their natural fear of the larger animals − with fatal consequences.

It’s unclear exactly when the boar started preying on the rabbits. Prof. Kaneko said the oldest reference to such predation dates back to 2017, with the boars appearing to have learned that docile, plump rabbits make good eating.

“We saw them hunting − which is also very rare,” he said. “It’s normally very difficult to actually watch an animal hunt in nature, which means they must be really accustomed to the presence of humans, which is also dangerous.”

From 2000 to 2019, some 172 people were killed by wild boar around the world, a rate of 8.6 deaths annually, more than the number of people killed each year in unprovoked shark attacks.

Prof. Kaneko came to Okunoshima at the behest of a friend, who was working on a children’s picture book about the island and wanted to know if it was possible to ascertain how the rabbits – which are not native to Japan – ended up there in the first place.

According to popular myth, the progenitors of the hundreds of bunnies that now attract streams of tourists to “rabbit island” can be traced back to a much darker time in Okunoshima’s history. From 1929 to 1945, the island was home to a top-secret poison gas research facility from which it was assumed the animals had escaped and then bred like, well, rabbits.

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If the current rabbit population all descended from a handful of test lab escapees, their genetic diversity should be relatively low. But Prof. Kaneko’s team found the opposite to be true, suggesting numerous introductions of rabbits to the island over the years.

“There is a story that many elementary schools in the area kept rabbits in the 1970s and several pairs were released on the island,” he told The Globe and Mail. “After that, people kept leaving rabbits on Okunoshima. For whatever reason, they think on the island there were already many rabbits, so adding one or two wouldn’t be a problem.”

The growing popularity of the island, which is in turn leading to more food and more rabbits, has created a problem, however.

As Japan grapples with a crisis of overtourism − driven by misaligned government incentives, social media and the weak yen − Prof. Kaneko said it is more important than ever to put in place effective guidelines to protect animals and the environment. In Okunoshima, this should include better monitoring of the rabbit and boar populations, as well as the local vegetation, and limits on what and how much tourists feed the animals.

“Now our economic situation is changing, many foreigners are coming to Japan,” he said. “We don’t want to stop tourism, but the goal should be to make tourism more sustainable.”