{"id":79382,"date":"2026-08-24T12:40:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T12:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/79382\/"},"modified":"2026-08-24T12:40:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T12:40:15","slug":"japans-rabbit-island-has-become-symbolic-of-the-overtourism-plaguing-the-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/79382\/","title":{"rendered":"Japan\u2019s \u2018rabbit island\u2019 has become symbolic of the overtourism plaguing the country"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Two tourists sit and feed hundreds of rabbits at Okunoshima Island on February 24, 2014 in Takehara, Japan. Overtourism has created a population of rabbits so large they have stripped the land of almost all edible vegetation, leaving them dependent on food brought by visitors.Chris McGrath\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

The tiny island of Okunoshima, off the coast of Japan\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

The same is true of the island\u2019s growing population of wild boar, which have started displaying behaviour almost never seen in nature. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey hunt the rabbits \u2212 it was very surprising to us,\u201d said Shingo Kaneko, an expert on conservation ecology at Fukushima University. \u201cWild boar are not carnivores. They eat a large variety of food, including scavenging on dead bodies, but they never usually hunt.\u201d <\/p>\n

First person: The tiny rabbits in my backyard remind me about the necessity of risk<\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u2212 with fatal consequences. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe saw them hunting \u2212 which is also very rare,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

People enjoy the rabbits at Okunoshima Island in February, 2023. Rabbits would not normally go near boar. 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, which have been displaying odd behaviours of hunting.Takehiko Suzuki\/Reuters<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Prof. Kaneko came to Okunoshima at the behest of a friend, who was working on a children\u2019s picture book about the island and wanted to know if it was possible to ascertain how the rabbits \u2013 which are not native to Japan \u2013 ended up there in the first place. <\/p>\n

According to popular myth, the progenitors of the hundreds of bunnies that now attract streams of tourists to \u201crabbit island\u201d can be traced back to a much darker time in Okunoshima\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Canadians rethink travel as overtourism crowds iconic destinations<\/a><\/p>\n

If the current rabbit population all descended from a handful of test lab escapees, their genetic diversity should be relatively low. But Prof. Kaneko\u2019s team found the opposite to be true, suggesting numerous introductions of rabbits to the island over the years. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a story that many elementary schools in the area kept rabbits in the 1970s and several pairs were released on the island,\u201d he told The Globe and Mail. \u201cAfter 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\u2019t be a problem.\u201d <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Professor Shingo Kaneko wants to see better guidelines in place to protect the animals and environment, including better monitoring of the populations and putting limits on how much the tourists can feed the rabbits.Chris McGrath\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

The growing popularity of the island, which is in turn leading to more food and more rabbits, has created a problem, however. <\/p>\n

As Japan grapples with a crisis of overtourism<\/a> \u2212 driven by misaligned government incentives, social media and the weak yen \u2212 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cNow our economic situation is changing, many foreigners are coming to Japan,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to stop tourism, but the goal should be to make tourism more sustainable.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Two tourists sit and feed hundreds of rabbits at Okunoshima Island on February…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79383,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[22309,22300,22310,212,22294,22311,1368,22293,22305,22306,22302,22295,22292,191,251,1729,22304,22299,22321,22296,22297,2752,8,22301,500,2164,22312,22298,22316,22317,22319,22314,22318,16714,22315,1258,14783,22308,180,22307,22313,3631,907,501,22303,8559,213,22320],"class_list":["post-79382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-alberta","tag-arts-news","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-japan","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}