History
Okutsugaru-Imabetsu Station traces its history to the Tsugaru-Imabetsu Station of the Kaikyō Line, opened on 1988-03-13 with the line itself. The site had originally been planned as the Shin-Tsugaru-Futamata Signal Box, the Honshū-side maintenance base for the Seikan Tunnel, but repeated petitions from Imabetsu Town led to it being built as a passenger station funded by the town. After the route for the Hokkaidō Shinkansen between Shin-Aomori and Sapporo was approved on 1998-01-31, the Japan Railway Construction Corporation announced a Shinkansen station here two days later. With the opening of the Shin-Aomori–Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto section on 2016-03-26, Tsugaru-Imabetsu was retired the previous day and Okutsugaru-Imabetsu opened on the same site, sharing a three-rail dual-gauge alignment with the Kaikyō freight line. It is the northernmost Shinkansen station on Honshū and the only JR Hokkaido passenger station outside Hokkaido — indeed the only station of any of the three island JR companies that lies on Honshū.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
Okutsugaru-Imabetsu has the fewest boarding passengers of any Shinkansen station in Japan — an average of about 60 a day over its first eleven months (26 March 2016 to the end of February 2017). It serves the small town of Imabetsu in Aomori Prefecture.