History
Hitoichiba Station opened on 6 January 1915 as Meisei Station on the privately built Shinano Railway in what is now Azumino, Nagano Prefecture, and was renamed to its present name on 1 May the same year. The Shinano Railway was nationalised in 1937, the station became a business-commission stop on 25 March 1983 with the introduction of CTC, freight handling ended in 1971 and parcel handling in 1984. JR East took over at the 1 April 1987 privatisation. A new wooden building, framed mainly in Nagano-grown Japanese cypress and shaped to evoke "the wind of the Northern Alps," opened on 16 December 2017. On 15 March 2025 the station joined the Tokyo metropolitan IC-card zone, becoming usable with Suica.
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 old station building stood for more than a hundred years before being replaced by the present cypress-clad structure in 2017, whose roof line is designed to evoke "the wind of the Northern Alps."