History
Dobukai Station opened on 25 December 1915 as Osarizawa Station (尾去沢駅) of the privately owned Akita Railway, serving the village of Nishikigi in Kazuno District as a freight station; passenger service began on 5 January 1916. The line was nationalised on 1 June 1934, and the station was renamed Dobukai on 1 April 1942. It has been unattended since 1 February 1962. According to the station article, the station was once connected to the Osarizawa copper mine by a horse-drawn tramway; this carried most of the mine's freight until a 1934 aerial cableway built to Rikuchū-Hanawa Station took over the bulk of the work. The station is in Kazuno City, formed on 1 April 1972 by the merger of Hanawa Town, Towada Town, Osarizawa Town and Hachimantai Village — at that time the largest municipality by area in Akita Prefecture. The Kazuno article notes that Kazuno was the only Akita city not to take part in the "Heisei mergers", leaving it as the eighth-largest by area in the prefecture today.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-06-09.
Where the English and Japanese sources differ, this account follows the Japanese source.
Notes
The Kazuno City article notes that, despite the city's proximity to Lake Towada, the municipal boundary does not actually touch the lake. Kazuno is also the only Akita city that chose not to participate in the Heisei mergers — a decision the article explicitly highlights as the reason its rank among Akita municipalities by area dropped from first to eighth.