Rabbit Island's Dark Secret: Japan's Hidden Poison Gas Factory

Okunoshima, known today as Rabbit Island, draws nearly 200,000 visitors a year to feed thousands of tame, fluffy rabbits in the Seto Inland Sea. But this idyllic paradise was once erased from official maps to hide a classified Imperial Japanese Army facility that produced over six kilotons of mustard and tear gas. This episode confronts that jarring contradiction and how a nation grapples with being both victim and aggressor.We trace the island's transformation from a quiet community of three fishing families into a secret weapons plant, the deception of teenage workers, and the postwar cover-up enabled by Cold War interest in the research data. We then explore the accidental rebirth as a rabbit sanctuary and the bold decision to build a poison gas museum in the middle of a viral tourist destination.How a legal loophole in the 1925 Geneva Protocol allowed weapons development and storageThe original 200 lab rabbits and why today's feral population is not their descendantsThe decades of enforced silence before workers received medical recognition in the 1980sHow a national park designation and zero predators let eight released rabbits multiply into thousandsCurator Murakami Hatsuichi's mission to show visitors Japan was both victim and aggressor