History
Urushiyama Station opened on 1 November 1902 as a state-owned railway station, in what is now Yamagata, Yamagata Prefecture, on the line that became the Ou Main Line (the Yamagata Line section operated by JR East). It carried JR Freight cargo service until that operation ended on 31 March 1999, and it was made unstaffed on 1 April 2005; the current station building was rebuilt and opened in March 2009. Yamagata City is the prefectural capital and largest city by population in Yamagata Prefecture; it developed as the castle town of Yamagata Castle (also called Kajō) and is one of Japan's designated Core Cities. Together with eleven surrounding municipalities the city forms the Yamagata Liaison Central City Sphere, with an urban-region population of roughly 510,000.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-25.
Notes
The Yamagata article notes that the city sits in the southern third of the Yamagata Basin on a fan-shaped piedmont, and that the name "Yamagata" originally meant "Yamakata" — "the foot of the mountains" — referring to the Zaō range of the Ou Mountains that walls in the eastern edge of the basin.