History
The station opened on 5 May 1895 as Yamaguchi on the private Kyushu Railway extension west from Saga to Takeo. The Kyushu Railway was nationalised on 1 July 1907. On 1 March 1913 it was renamed Hizen-Yamaguchi to avoid confusion with another Yamaguchi Station that had opened nine days earlier in Yamaguchi Prefecture. The route reorganisation of 1 December 1934 made it the western terminus of the new Sasebo Line and a station on the rerouted Nagasaki Main Line. JNR privatisation transferred operations to JR Kyushu on 1 April 1987, and a new overhead building was completed on 24 December 2003. On 23 September 2022, coinciding with the Nishi-Kyushu Shinkansen opening, the station was renamed Kōhoku.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-06-09.
Notes
Under its old name of Hizen-Yamaguchi the station served as the terminus of Japan's 'longest one-way ticket' route from 1989 until 2022; a monument commemorating the NHK travelogue 'Across the Archipelago: 12,000 km by Rail' still stands on the north side.