If I were allowed to make lists a la Sei Shonagon, I'd add to the one titled "Moving Things," the white of the egret wrapped in a green rice paddy. The rice harvest is just beginning, the fishermen moving into the fields, riding up and back the rows on their tractors. One completed, they'll trun once more to the sea, to their oysters and sea bream. Then they'll turn indoors, to wait out winter.
I find a massive queue for my boat out to Okunoshima. I've heard about how popular the place has become, especially with the foreigners. There are are few ahead of me, taking up space with their huge backpacks. Luckily the boat the big car ferry, with plenty of room for all. The shipping company too is maximizing the tourist boom, and as the island wells up, it is announced that we are about to arrive on Rabbit Island.
They must be conditioned to the sound of the engines, and even before we dock, a couple of dozen rabbits appear from the bushes. As I walk across the grass in the direction of the visitor center, they seem to be everywhere, around the benches, tucked around and beneath the wooden walkways that line the shore. The ferry passengers are all hard at work in feeding them, with carrots and bags of feed that was sold at the ferry terminal and at the local convenience store. The former has a good system where you return the empty plastic bags for postcards when you return to the port.
The island has no homes, the only inhabitants being the transient workers who come from the mainland to work the visitor center, the gas museum, or the Kyukamura Resort here. The former is surprising in size and content, with dispalys of the wildlife and even a passage that allows you see what is happening underground. I pay a visit to the museum, which doesn't hold my interest for very long. The gas works themselves are on the north end of the island, merely a shell now. It was secretly developed in the 1920s to develop mustard gas, converted from an old fishery. Employees and the few residents of the island were never told what was manufactured here, and little surprise that many of them fell ill from exposure. The US Occupation forces were co-conspirators in this, destroying records and covering up evidence after the war. And the usual Japanese aversion to its wartime history can be inferred by one of the English explanations that say no one is sure how many people were affected during the war. In fact we do know: 80,000 victims during the 2000 times the gas was used.
Most people assume that the island's famous rabbits are descendants of animals tested in the factories. The Americans euthanized those after the war. The current colony originated with eight animals brought here by school children in 1971, and has since exploded into over a thousand. The tourism of course justifies this as a boon rather than as a problem , though one sign made me chuckle as it asks visitors to refrain from releasing their own pet rabbits. (Though nowhere did it say that you can't take a few home.)
The largest number of animals, and people, is on the broad lawns of the Kyukamura Resort. Aside from a few towering palms, there is little shade, and as I walk along the hot and sunny west shore the only rabbits I see are resting in shallow pits they've dig in the shade. The path itself gets far more shade as it wraps around the north end of the island. There are a number of old gun barracks here, some as old as the China War of 1895. Later during the Korean War, the US stored weapons in the ruins. For me this was the best part of the walk, ducking in and out of the ruins, before facing the main attraction: the massive gas works, towering sulkily amongst the vegetation, gutted completely with only light filling its broken windows.
Much later, I read an article about the rabbits on the Modern Farmer website that states that the ecosystem here is completely unsustainable, as the rabbit are fed a great deal on sunny days like the one I had, but then get nothing when the rains keep the visitors away. This imbalance, the lack of actual edible vegetation on the island due to overpopulation, has shortened their life span to two years.
And so it was that their source of sustenance boarded the ship back across the water. Along the way I thought I was being witty in thinking of this land of bunnies as Easter Island. Yet as that island's residents too had deforested and overpopulated themselves into extinction, it no longer seems so amusing.
On the turntable: The Church, "Of Skins and Heart"
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