History
Uzen-Komatsu Station opened on 28 September 1926, the day the JR East (then JNR) Yonesaka Line section between Yonezawa and Imaizumi was inaugurated, in the town of Kawanishi in Higashiokitama District, Yamagata Prefecture. Kawanishi is a town of about 13,000 people in the southern part of Yamagata Prefecture, sitting in roughly the centre of the Okitama Basin. Its name comes from being on the western side of the Onimegawa, a tributary of the Mogami River. The present town was formed on 1 January 1955 from the merger of Tamaniwa, Ōtsuka, Inukawa, Komatsu and Nakagōri municipalities, with Kichijima incorporated the following month.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-25.
Notes
The Kawanishi article records that the writer Inoue Hisashi was born in the town, and that in 1878 the English traveller Isabella Bird lodged in Komatsu, at the residence of the village headman Kaneko Jūsanemon, where roughly half the townspeople reportedly gathered to see the foreign visitor.