History
Higashi-Nagasawa Station opened on 10 July 1959 as a station of Japanese National Railways (JNR), in what is now Funagata, Mogami District, Yamagata Prefecture; today it is operated by JR East on the Rikuu East Line. Funagata is a town of roughly 5,000 people in the north of Yamagata, formed where the Kogunigawa river flows in from Mogami Town to join the Mogami River. From the Edo period it developed as a post town on the Ushū Kaidō used for sankin-kōtai (alternate attendance) traffic and as a crossroads where the Mogami Kaidō ran east to Sendai Domain and the Funagata Kaidō ran west toward Shōnai Domain and the Dewa Sanzan mountains.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-25.
Notes
Funagata's article records that when the Mogami coal field — once classed alongside Gifu's and Miyagi's deposits among Japan's three great lignite fields — was opened up in the Meiji era, lignite mined inside the modern town's boundaries was shipped out via Funagata Station and Nagasawa Station, the latter being on the same Rikuu East Line stretch as today's Higashi-Nagasawa Station.