History
Chino Station opened on 25 November 1905 on what is now the Chuo Main Line in the city of Chino, Nagano. The site was chosen after a fierce siting campaign between the lowland Miyagawa village's Chino district and the upland Eimei village's Tsukahara district, decided in December 1901 in favour of Tsukahara, while the station name came from Chino. Operation passed from Japanese National Railways to JR East at privatisation on 1 April 1987. From the March 1986 introduction of the current station building, all passenger services have stopped at Chino. Station numbering CO56 was applied to the line in February 2025.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
When Eimei village was incorporated as a town in 1948, it adopted the station name in hiragana — "Chino-machi" — making it the first municipality in Japan to use a hiragana-only place name.