History
The provisional name of Arai Station was announced in October 2000. Construction began in 2009 but was suspended after the 11 March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake damaged the planned station site and halted work on every segment of the project. The station building design was unveiled in June 2012 and the final name was confirmed on 24 December 2013. On 3 March 2015 a Gion weeping cherry tree donated by Tōuemon Sano XVI, the sixteenth-generation 'cherry guardian' of Kyoto, was planted in the station plaza; named "Sendai Naminowake-zakura" after the local Naminowake Shrine, it was intended to convey the lessons of the Great East Japan Earthquake a thousand years into the future. Arai Station opened on 6 December 2015 as the eastern terminus of the Sendai Subway Tōzai Line, station number T13. The Sendai 3.11 Memorial Community Centre opened on the same day on the ground floor of the station building, with the exhibition rooms opening on 13 February 2016 to fully open the centre. Arai Māya Nursery opened on the second floor in April 2016.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
Arai is the easternmost subway station on the island of Honshū. Within the station building stand the Sendai 3.11 Memorial Community Centre (ground-floor community space, second-floor exhibition rooms and studio, third-floor rooftop garden) created to pass down the experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake to later generations. Unlike Yagiyama Zoological Park Station at the western terminus, Arai has no crossover toward the Yagiyama side, so platform 1 is used only for alighting; departing trains run via the Arai Depot connecting line and a relief siding before returning to platform 2 a few minutes later as Yagiyama-bound services.