The dark history behind Japan's rabbit island

Hiroshima is often remembered in Japan as a symbol of wartime suffering. But just dozens of kilometers away, Okunoshima tells a different story — one of Japan's wartime aggression.

Today, the island is known for its rabbits. Yet during the war, it was a secret poison gas production base for the Imperial Japanese Army — so secret that it was once erased from maps. The chemical agents produced there were turned into weapons and shipped to battlefields in China.

Japanese researchers and civic activists say Japan must remember not only its own wartime suffering, but also the suffering it inflicted on the people of China and elsewhere in Asia.