History
Ōnodai Station opened on 1965-04-20 as an unstaffed passenger halt on the Japanese National Railways Aniai Line, in what was then Aikawa Town in Akita's Kita-Akita District. The town of Aikawa paid the full 8-million-yen construction cost, making it a petitioned station. Local children had previously walked along the tracks to reach Aikawa-Higashi Elementary School in winter when farm roads became impassable, and a 1963 incident in which pupils threw stones at a passing steam locomotive drew official attention. Construction proceeded only after a planned welfare institution, Aiseien, was relocated to the Kanazawa hamlet near the station site. The Aniai Line was converted on 1986-11-01 to the third-sector Akita Nairiku Jukan Tetsudō, which operates the station today.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
The station exists because Aikawa Town agreed to relocate the planned Aiseien welfare institution from the Kawai hamlet to the Kanazawa hamlet near the new station; Aiseien opened roughly six months after the station and has since grown into the 1,000-resident Ōnodai-no-Sato complex.