History
Ōtsuchi Station opened on 5 April 1938 as a Ministry of Railways station on the Yamada Line, in what is now Ōtsuchi, Iwate Prefecture; it became an intermediate station when the line reached Kamaishi on 17 September 1939. JR East took over at the JNR privatisation on 1 April 1987. The station building and surroundings were swept away by the tsunami of the 11 March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. When the rebuilt Miyako–Kamaishi segment was transferred to the Sanriku Railway on 23 March 2019, Ōtsuchi reopened as an intermediate station on the unified Rias Line; the replacement building, completed on 1 February 2019, takes a circular gourd-island shape that won a public design vote in August 2017.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
The reconstructed station building is shaped like a gourd, a reference to the offshore Hōrai-jima — the inspiration for the puppet drama Hyokkori Hyōtanjima — and was chosen by townspeople over two other design proposals in an August 2017 public vote.