Shiwa-chuo

History

Shiwa-Chūō Station opened on 14 March 1998 as a citizen-petition station, with about 268 million yen of the 270 million yen target funded by community donations because legal limits restricted Shiwa Town's direct outlay. The platforms were built between the existing Hizume and Furudate stations to serve the converging National Routes 4 and 396 and the Tohoku Expressway. Initially a prefab station building hosted services until a single-storey wooden station-waiting facility — formally a Shiwa Town building rather than rail infrastructure — was completed on 12 November 2001 under Forestry Agency subsidy. Staffing arrived on 17 March 2018 with a Midori-no-Madoguchi window, and Suica acceptance followed on 27 May 2023.

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 wooden waiting facility's central octagonal tower symbolises the one town and eight villages that merged to form Shiwa, and many of its components are dimensioned in numbers — 140, 57, 39 and 28 — drawn from the town's exact coordinates of 140°57'E / 39°28'N.