History
Niki Station (number S19) is on the JR Hokkaido Hakodate Main Line in Niki, Yoichi District, Hokkaido. It opened on 10 December 1902 with the Hokkaido Railway's line between Shikaribetsu and Ranshima, was nationalised in 1907 and reassigned to the Hakodate Main Line in 1909, and passed to JR Hokkaido at the 1987 privatisation. Niki, in the northern part of the Shiribeshi Subprefecture, came into being on 1 November 1964 when the former village of Ōe was renamed and elevated to town status; per Niki's Wikipedia article it is a fruit-growing town named after the Tokushima-Prefecture pioneer Niki Takeyoshi, who led some 360 settlers from his home province in November 1879, and apples, grapes and cherries grow widely on the slopes of the middle Yoichi River basin.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-25.
Notes
The Niki article records an interesting twist of fate: in 2012 the closed Niki Commercial High School site became host to a relocated branch of Hokkaido Geijutsu (Arts) High School, a private correspondence-education school that moved from Shimizu Town to take over the buildings — a small example of repurposing rural-Hokkaido educational infrastructure that the town's article highlights.