History
Itoigawa Station opened on 16 December 1912 as the terminus of the Japanese government railway's Shinetsu Line extension from Nadachi, and from April 1913 became part of the newly designated Hokuriku Main Line. The original station burned down in the 1932 Itoigawa fire and was rebuilt. The Ōito Line opened from here towards Nechi in 1934. Upon privatisation in April 1987 the station passed to JR West. On 14 March 2015 the Hokuriku Shinkansen's Nagano-to-Kanazawa extension opened, adding a new elevated shinkansen platform encased in a snow shelter, while local Hokuriku Main Line services were transferred to the third-sector Echigo Tokimeki Railway's Nihonkai Hisui Line, leaving the Ōito Line as JR West's only conventional service here.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
The shinkansen platform's departure melody is the children's song "Haru yo Koi" — its lyricist Gyofū Sōma was an Itoigawa native — and the south-side concourse incorporates a salvaged 1912 brick locomotive shed wall as a monument.