History
Goryōkaku Station opened on 1 September 1911 as a new station on the Japanese Government Railways' Hakodate Main Line, and on 15 September 1913 became the starting terminus of the Kamiiso (later Esashi) Line. It is today JR Hokkaido station H74 in Kameda-honchō, Hakodate, and is also served by the Dōnan Isaribi Railway after the 2016 reorganisation. Hakodate, in the south of Hokkaidō within the Oshima Subprefecture, is the third-largest city in the prefecture (population about 240,000) after Sapporo and Asahikawa, and a core city. Hakodate Port was one of the first treaty ports opened to foreign trade in the Bakumatsu era under the Ansei Five-Power Treaties. The Hakodate article explicitly identifies the city as the battleground of the Battle of Hakodate (the final phase of the Boshin War, also known as the Battle of Goryōkaku) — the same star-shaped fortress for which this station is named, located about two kilometres away.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-25.
Notes
For the station's 100th anniversary on 5 August 2011, JR Hokkaido renewed the station building's exterior and changed the station-name signs to a star shape modeled on Goryōkaku itself — making the namesake fortress visible even at the platform.