History
Engaru Station is on the JR Hokkaido Sekihoku Main Line in Engaru, Monbetsu District, Hokkaido, with station number A50. It opened on 1 November 1915 as a station of the government-built Yūbetsu Light Railway and became a busy junction after 1932, when the Sekihoku Line opened and trains began reversing direction here; the through service from the Nayoro Main Line continued until that line was abolished on 1 May 1989, leaving Engaru as a switchback-only stop on the Sekihoku route. According to Engaru's Wikipedia article, the present-day town was formed on 1 October 2005 by the equal merger of the former Engaru, Ikutahara, Maruseppu, and Shirataki municipalities (three towns and one village), and ranks as one of Japan's largest "towns or villages" by area — third nationwide after Rubetsu Village and Ashoro Town, both also in Hokkaido — while holding the largest population among non-city municipalities in the Okhotsk Subprefecture.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-25.
Notes
The Engaru article notes that the town's Shirataki district was, in the Late Palaeolithic period, one of Japan's foremost producers of obsidian and obsidian stone tools — registered today as the Shirataki Geopark — and that 1,965 stone-tool artefacts excavated there are designated a National Treasure as the "Hokkaido Shirataki Sites archaeological finds".