History
The station opened on 11 January 1898 as Kawaguchi Station (川口駅) on the Nippon Railway. It was nationalised on 1 November 1906 and renamed Iwate-Kawaguchi on 1 February 1934 to avoid confusion with the larger Kawaguchi Station in Saitama Prefecture, which adopted that name two weeks later. Freight ended on 15 August 1971, the station was outsourced in May 1980 and became unstaffed on 14 March 1985. After JNR privatisation on 1 April 1987 it operated under JR East, then transferred to the third-sector IGR Iwate Galaxy Railway on 1 December 2002 when the Tōhoku Shinkansen was extended to Hachinohe. A new station building, themed on the local "Iwate Harumidori" cabbage, opened on 1 December 2017.
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 2017 station building is shaped to evoke a head of "Iwate Harumidori" cabbage — the town's signature crop — and the staffed counter still sells stiff-card platform and travel tickets.