History
Masukata Station opened on 7 December 1913 as a station of the government-owned Sakata Line (later renamed the Rikuu West Line), in what is now Shinjō, Yamagata Prefecture. Operated today by JR East, it suspended rail service on 14 May 2022 to allow Takaya-tunnel construction work along the line and is scheduled to resume rail operation on 16 January 2026. The station's name is read "Masukata" although the local placename is read "Masugata." Shinjō, in northeastern Yamagata, is the central city of the Mogami region and received city status in 1949. Historically it was the castle town of the 60,000-koku Tozawa-clan Shinjō Domain and a post town on the Ushū Kaidō; the city lies in the Shinjō Basin in the middle Mogami River drainage, with the line of the Kamuro Range to the east, and serves as the northern terminus of the Yamagata Shinkansen at Shinjō Station.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-25.
Notes
Shinjō's article notes that the city is considered to have one of the shortest annual sunshine totals of any municipality in Japan — a side-effect of sitting in a heavy-snow basin walled in by mountains — and is the designated home of NIED's Snow and Ice Research Centre Shinjō Branch as well as the Yuki-no-Sato Information Centre, which carries on the region's tradition as the birthplace of the snow-disaster relief movement.