History
Kuroiwa Station opened on 3 November 1903, as part of the Hokkaido Railway's Mori–Netsubu opening, and is today JR Hokkaido station H51 on the Hakodate Main Line in Kuroiwa, Yakumo, Futami District, Hokkaidō. The station name is a Japanese rendering of the Ainu phrase kunne-suma or kunne-sirar (both meaning "black rock"), referring to dark columnar basalt reefs that project from the nearby coastline. Yakumo Town lies in the northern Oshima Peninsula within the Oshima Subprefecture, midway between Hakodate and Muroran. The current municipality dates from the 1 October 2005 merger of the former Yakumo Town (in Yamakoshi District) with Kumaishi Town (in Nishi District), creating the only town in Japan that fronts on both the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Japan.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-25.
Notes
Kuroiwa is older than the present-day Yakumo Town: in 1881 it broke off from Yamakoshi-nai Village together with Yūrappu to form Yakumo Village, which the Yakumo article identifies as the beginning of the modern municipality.