History
Wakkanai Station opened on 26 December 1928 as Wakkanai-Minato ("Wakkanai Port") Station, an extension of the Soya Line built to serve the Chihaku ferry route to Sakhalin. In 1939 it was renamed Wakkanai when the earlier inland station took the name Minami-Wakkanai. A platform-level annex, Wakkanai-Sanbashi, served the ferry pier from 1938 until the route was suspended in August 1945. The station passed to Japanese National Railways in 1949 and to JR Hokkaido at privatisation on 1 April 1987. The single remaining track was singled in January 2010, and the current fourth-generation station building opened inside the Kitacolor complex on 3 April 2011. The rails and buffer stop removed when the second track was abolished in 2010 were donated by JR Hokkaido to the city and reassembled in the station plaza in March 2012 as the "Northernmost Rail in Japan" monument, the buffer-stop line point having shifted about 100 m south with the new building.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
Wakkanai is the northernmost railway station in Japan that is still in operation — the northern terminus of the 259.4 km Sōya Main Line from Asahikawa, numbered W80 — a distinction marked on the platform and in the station plaza.