Right off the bat, Okunoshima is a rather tiny island. Located on Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, it is officially also referred to as Rabbit Island – for the premise is pretty straightforward: hundreds of adorable, friendly rabbits, roaming the wild, as they should. Okunoshima is home to roughly 700 to 1,000 wild rabbits – all descendants of roughly 8 rabbits released into the wild by elementary school groups, an effort by the island’s first hotel manager to garner publicity. Given that these 8 rabbits thrived with natural predators, a population explosion led to the island soon being dubbed, ‘Rabbit Island’.
