History
Kawai Station opened on 1 July 1944, the same day the Ministry of Transport and Communications' Ōme Line was extended from Mitake to Hikawa (now Okutama), in what is today the town of Okutama in western Tokyo. It handled only passenger traffic from the outset. Hand-luggage operations were withdrawn on 10 April 1958, the station became unstaffed on 1 February 1971, and it passed to JR East with the privatisation of Japanese National Railways on 1 April 1987. Suica use began on 8 February 2002, the present station building entered service on 1 March 2011 after construction begun the previous November, and on 24 January 2017 ticket sales and IC-card charging at the vending machine were ended. The station has a single curved side platform; the Higashi-Kawai signal box just towards Mitake was closed on 20 March 2001 after limestone traffic from Okutama ceased.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
Because the platform is built on a tight curve, the gap between the doorways and the platform edge is unusually large; after a 1999 fatal fall the station was fitted with track-side fall-detection sensors, extra lighting, and one of the densest concentrations of platform cameras among the Ōme Line's unstaffed stops.