History
Sōri Station opened on 31 December 1912 as a station of the Ashio Railway and was nationalised on 1 June 1918, becoming part of the JNR Ashio Line. Freight handling ended in 1970 and parcel handling in 1984, and the station passed briefly to JR East at the 1987 privatisation before transferring to the third-sector Watarase Keikoku Railway on 29 March 1989, when it was also unstaffed and the kana spelling changed from "sōri" to "sōri" written differently. Today the wooden station building also houses a simple post office and serves a stop on the Watarase Keikoku Line, station number WK13. The platform and waiting room were registered as a national Tangible Cultural Property on 2 November 2009.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-06-09.
Where the English and Japanese sources differ, this account follows the Japanese source.
Notes
The wooden station building doubles as the Sōri Simple Post Office on weekdays, and local residents have planted around 2,200 hydrangea bushes around the platforms; the 2018 NHK morning drama Hanbun, Aoi used the station as fictional "Natsumushi Station" in a sequence broadcast that June.