Quirky Japan Chronicles – Episode 31: Japan’s Rabbit Islands, Fox Villages, and the Strange Joy of Animal Tourism
By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
I wrote, in a previous episode of this series, about Japan’s cat islands — the small islands where cats substantially outnumber the human residents, and where visitors arrive by ferry to be immediately surrounded by cats who have assessed the situation and concluded that visitors probably have food.
The cat islands are real and they are genuinely enjoyable, but they are not the complete picture of Japan’s animal tourism ecosystem. Japan has developed, alongside the cat islands, a range of other animal-human encounter experiences that are simultaneously more planned, more accessible, and in some cases more extraordinary than anything a cat island provides.
I want to give you the full picture.
Ōkunoshima: The Rabbit Island
Ōkunoshima — also called Usagi Shima (Rabbit Island) — is a small island in the Seto Inland Sea, approximately four kilometres from the port town of Tadanoumi in Hiroshima Prefecture. The island has a population of approximately zero permanent human residents and approximately 700 to 1,000 rabbits.
The rabbits were introduced to the island in 1971 by a group of schoolchildren who released a small number of pet rabbits. The island’s mild climate, the absence of natural predators (dogs and cats are prohibited on the island), and the continuous provision of food by visitors produced a rabbit population that has grown to its current remarkable scale.
The Ōkunoshima experience: you arrive by ferry from Tadanoumi (approximately fifteen minutes), step off the boat, and are immediately surrounded by rabbits. Not cautiously approaching rabbits who might flee if you move too quickly. Confident, enthusiastic rabbits who have decided that you are primarily a food delivery service and are organising themselves accordingly. Rabbits who climb on your lap if you sit down. Rabbits who run toward rather than away from approaching humans. Rabbits who, in large numbers, create a specific visual spectacle of extraordinary cuteness.
You bring pellets (available for purchase at the ferry terminal and at the island’s small resort hotel) and distribute them. The rabbits eat. Everyone is happy.
The island has an additional historical dimension that is darker than the rabbit population suggests: during World War Two, Ōkunoshima was the site of a chemical weapons production facility — a classified installation whose existence was removed from maps during the war. A small museum on the island documents this history, providing a specific contrast to the cheerful rabbit encounter that most visitors have come for. The coexistence of the rabbit tourist experience and the chemical weapons museum on the same small island is one of the more specifically Japanese juxtapositions I know.
Getting there: JR Kure Line to Tadanoumi Station, then bus or walk to Tadanoumi Port (approximately ten minutes), then ferry to Ōkunoshima. The ferry runs several times per day.
Miyagi Zao Fox Village: A Thousand Foxes
Miyagi Zao Fox Village (Miyagi Zao Kitsune Mura) — located in the mountains of Miyagi Prefecture near the Zao hot spring area — is an outdoor park in which approximately one thousand Japanese foxes (Vulpes vulpes japonica) and several arctic fox variants roam freely across a forested hillside while visitors walk among them.
The foxes are not domesticated. They are not tame in the way that the Ōkunoshima rabbits have become effectively tame through generations of human contact and food provision. The Zao foxes retain their full animal behaviour — they are curious, they investigate unfamiliar things, but they are also capable of the specific quick movement and unpredictable behaviour of an animal that is still primarily wild.
Walking among a thousand foxes on a forested hillside in winter, with snow on the ground, the foxes’ thick winter coats fully grown, their breath visible in the cold air — this is one of the genuinely extraordinary wildlife experiences available in Japan without going to a wildlife reserve or a zoo. The foxes move around you and among you, investigating and ignoring and occasionally giving the specific intense look that foxes give, with their pointed faces and intelligent eyes.
The park also has a separate enclosed area where you can hold a fox — for an additional fee — though the holding experience is considerably less interesting than simply walking among the free-roaming animals.
Important practical note: the Zao Fox Village is in a mountainous area with specific seasonal access. Winter visits (when the foxes have their thick coats) require careful planning for road conditions. Check current accessibility before visiting.
Getting there: the Fox Village is not on a direct public transport route — a taxi or rental car from Shiroishi-Zaō Station (Tōhoku Shinkansen) is the most practical access.
Nara: The City Where Deer Own the Streets
I mention Nara here not because it requires much introduction — it is one of Japan’s most famous tourist destinations — but because the specific deer encounter that Nara provides is so distinctive that it belongs in any survey of Japan’s animal encounters.
The sika deer of Nara — approximately 1,300 animals that roam freely through the city’s central park and surrounding streets — have been designated as national treasures and were historically considered sacred messengers of the gods of Kasuga Taisha shrine. They are, in the contemporary context, extremely confident animals who have learned that tourists carrying shika senbei (deer crackers, sold throughout the park) are food delivery vehicles.
The Nara deer encounter is different from both the rabbit island experience and the fox village experience in its specific character. The deer are large animals — not lap-size or arm-size but full-size deer that come up to waist height — and their engagement with tourists is assertive in a way that smaller animals are not. A group of deer who have identified you as a cracker carrier and who are pursuing you through the park is a genuinely funny and slightly alarming experience.
The deer also bow — in the specific deer gesture of lowering and raising the head that Nara visitors have learned to interpret as a request for crackers and to replicate as a request for the deer to bow in return. This cross-species social convention, developed through generations of deer-tourist interaction, is one of the more charming things in Japanese tourism.
Ise: The Dancing Chickens
Less internationally famous but worth including: the nagoya cochin chickens of various Ise area farms that have developed specific tourist programs, and the broader world of Japanese satoyama farm tourism where visitors can interact with traditional farm animals in traditional farm settings.
Japan has developed a substantial rural tourism industry around the specific experiences that modern urban life does not provide: contact with farm animals, participation in agricultural activities, the specific quality of being in an environment where animals are present as working partners rather than as pets or zoo exhibits. This industry is worth acknowledging as part of the broader animal encounter landscape.
The Owl Cafes and Other Themed Animal Cafes
Beyond the geographical animal encounters, Japan has developed an extensive ecosystem of animal-themed cafes in which various species are available for interaction while you drink coffee.
The cat cafe is the most famous and most established — I have written about it in Episode 1 of this series. The concept has been applied to: owls (fukurō kafe), hedgehogs, rabbits, snakes, capybaras, otters, and various other animals, each with their own dedicated cafe establishments in major cities.
The specific pleasures and the specific ethical concerns of these establishments vary by species and by establishment. The owl cafe — the most common animal cafe after the cat cafe — has attracted specific ethical discussion about whether the conditions for the nocturnal, solitary, stress-sensitive owl are appropriate in a daytime cafe environment with multiple handling interactions per day.
I want to be honest: the ethical questions around animal cafes are genuine, and the answers vary significantly by establishment. The cat cafe, where cats are residents who can seek privacy and who are generally comfortable with human interaction, is ethically different from the owl cafe, where the animals’ comfort with the specific cafe environment is more questionable. Choosing establishments that prioritise the animals’ wellbeing — that have adequate space, appropriate care, and genuine limitation on handling — is worth the research effort.
What Japan’s Animal Tourism Reveals
Japan’s extraordinary development of animal encounter tourism — from the cat islands to the fox village to the owl cafes — reflects several specific things about Japanese culture and contemporary Japanese life.
The density and pace of urban Japanese life creates specific needs for natural and animal encounters that the urban environment does not satisfy. The working adult in Tokyo who cannot keep a pet in their small apartment, who has limited access to natural environments, and who has limited leisure time for travel finds in the animal cafe or the nearby animal park a specific quality of encounter that their daily environment denies.
The specific Japanese quality of making these encounters extremely cute — of surrounding the animal encounter with the visual and emotional language of kawaii — is a specifically Japanese aesthetic choice that shapes the experience into something specifically Japanese rather than merely universal animal tourism.
And the willingness to develop extremely specific and extremely unusual forms of this tourism — the rabbit island, the fox village, the capybara cafe — reflects the same quality of creative specificity that I find in the best aspects of Japanese culture generally: the willingness to take a specific idea very seriously and pursue it to its logical, occasionally absurd conclusion.
One thousand foxes in a mountain village in Miyagi Prefecture.
Only in Japan.
— Yoshi 🦊 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Quirky Japan Chronicles – Episode 24: Japan’s Cat Islands” and “Quirky Japan Chronicles – Episode 1: Cat Cafés” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
