History
Mizunuma Station opened on 5 September 1912 as Mizunuma Teishajō on the privately owned Ashio Railway, taking its current name on 1 June 1918 when the railway was nationalised into the Ashio Line. Freight and parcel handling ended on 1 October 1970, and the station was transferred to JR East at the 1 April 1987 privatisation of Japanese National Railways. On 29 March 1989 the line was spun off to the third-sector Watarase Keikoku Railway and Mizunuma simultaneously became unstaffed. An on-platform hot-spring bath, opened in December 1989 and reopened in April 2025 under the Hottoland-operated name "Mizunuma no Yu", earned the station a place on the 1997 Top 100 Kantō Stations list as the only Kantō station with its own open-air natural onsen.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
Mizunuma is the only station in the Kantō region with its own natural open-air hot-spring bath on the platform, a distinction that earned it inclusion on the 1997 Top 100 Kantō Stations list.