History
Moichi Station opened on 6 November 1934 as part of the Yamada Line, and on 25 June 1942 it became the junction with the Omoto Line, the predecessor of the Iwaizumi Line. Service was wiped out by floods on 26 November 1946 and the Yamada Line section as far as Hikime did not reopen until 5 March 1949. The station passed to JR East on 1 April 1987. The Iwaizumi Line was suspended on 31 July 2010 after a landslide — bus replacement service began two days later — and the line was officially closed on 1 April 2014. The station lies in Miyako City, on Iwate Prefecture's Sanriku coast; Miyako gained city status in 1941 (Iwate's third, after Morioka and Kamaishi), and after the 2005 merger with Tarō Town and Niisato Village, and the 2010 absorption of Kawai Village, the modern Miyako became the largest city in Iwate Prefecture by area — and the eleventh-largest in Japan. Miyako also includes Cape Tōrigasaki on the Omoe Peninsula, the easternmost point of Honshū.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-06-09.
Notes
The Miyako City article explicitly records both halves of Moichi Station's story as city milestones: the station's opening in 1934 as part of the Yamada Line, and the 2014 abolition of the Iwaizumi Line that had branched off here for more than 70 years, "linking Moichi Station and Iwaizumi Station in Iwaizumi Town, Shimohei District."