The Island of Rabbits

  
"Would you like to come with us to Rabbit Island?" asked the Girl of Enduring Beauty.

And so began my visit to Okunoshima, a tiny island in Japan's Inland Sea, with the Girl of Enduring Beauty and her children.

Okunoshima was once a top-secret military site -- so secret that it was removed from the maps -- where poison gas was made in the 1930s and 1940s.

It isn't, one would think, the sort of place to go for a day-trip with children.

But that was before the rabbits took over.

In 1946, Allied occupation troops destroyed Okunoshima's poison gas factory and released the island's surviving laboratory rabbits into the wild.

Those rabbits did what rabbits do, and today Okunoshima is home to thousands of flop-eared rodents, earning it the nickname Usagi Shima (Rabbit Island).

We hired bicycles from the island's hotel and explored the island, stopping to play on a small beach where the only footprints were our own.

Nearby, behind a tall earth bank, stood the grim, ivy-covered ruins of the island's power station -- used to produce electricity for the gas factory.

But the Girl of Enduring Beauty and her children -- like many pet-less Japanese -- are cravers of all things cute, so the big attraction for them was the rabbits.

And although the rabbits are wild, they're used to humans and will approach you in numbers for a free feed.

Visitors are allowed to pet, handle, and tire themselves out chasing the rabbits.

Okunoshima is a National Park, where dogs, cats and Holy Hand Grenades of Antioch are strictly prohibited.