History
Kanazawa Station opened on 1 April 1898 as the terminus of the Japanese Government Railway Hokuriku Line when the Komatsu-Kanazawa segment came into service; the initial Western-style wooden east-exit building had been completed the previous month. It became a through station on 1 November 1898 with the Kanazawa-Takaoka extension, and joined the newly named Hokuriku Main Line in 1909. JNR's 1 April 1987 privatisation transferred it to JR West and JR Freight, and a fully elevated station structure was completed by 1991. The Hokuriku Shinkansen reached Kanazawa on 14 March 2015 - shifting the parallel local rail to IR Ishikawa Railway - and the line was extended to Tsuruga on 16 March 2024, after which Kanazawa lost all JR conventional service.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
In 2011 the American travel magazine Travel & Leisure ranked Kanazawa Station's "Tsuzumi-mon" drum-gate and "Motenashi Dome" canopy sixth in its online list of the world's fourteen most beautiful stations, the only Japanese station on the list.