History
Saigane Station opened on 21 March 1926 as a stop on what is now the Suigun Line. Its construction was the product of a violent dispute: when survey work in 1921 revealed that residents around the planned Kami-Ogawa and Shimo-Ogawa stations had been left out of the plan, those communities attacked the surveying engineer and forced the alignment to be changed. Saigane was then dropped from the new plan, which in turn enraged its own residents, who staged their own attacks on the construction crews and refused to sell land. The Railway Ministry briefly suspended construction altogether, only to face fresh protests from Hitachi-Daigo, and Prime Minister Katō Takaaki ultimately intervened so that stations were built at all three locations. Saigane passed to the JR East network at the 1 April 1987 privatisation of JNR.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-06-09.
Notes
Two monuments commemorating the violent 1920s petition disputes were erected in front of the Saigane station building, the first in 1957 and the second in 1961.