History
Nobeyama Station opened on 29 November 1935 with the completion of the Ministry of Railways' Koumi Line between Kiyosato and Shinano-Kawakami, in the village of Minamimaki, Nagano Prefecture. On 25 April 1960 it became the highest ordinary-railway station in Japan when the Kusakaru Electric Railway's Kunizakaira Station (1,371 m) closed. The current third-generation station building was completed in March 1983, and at the privatisation of Japanese National Railways on 1 April 1987 the station came under JR East. Its original 1935 building was a celebrated streamlined-vault Modernist design — old rails used as reinforcement under a lath-and-mortar shell — but the shell-only, no-tile vault leaked from year one and lasted barely 15 years before being replaced with an ordinary wooden structure in 1948.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
At 1,345.67 m above sea level, Nobeyama is the highest station in Japan operated by the JR Group, and the highest among Japan's ordinary (non-cable, non-ropeway) railways; the JR Group's highest point on the rails, 1,375 m, lies about 2.3 km away toward neighbouring Kiyosato. Counting funiculars and aerial ropeways, higher stations exist — Kurobedaira (1,828 m) and Senjōjiki (2,612 m).