History
Ashikajima Station first opened on 28 December 1913 as a stop on the Chōshi Sightseeing Railway, a 5.9 km tourist line between Chōshi and Inuboh. The railway closed in November 1917 but was revived as the Chōshi Railway on 5 July 1923, with Ashikajima reopened on the same alignment. The current station building dates from 1951. The station became fully unstaffed on 1 January 2008, although the former station office has since been converted into a small art space, the "Japan's Smallest Art Museum", opened in June 2024. A plaque erected on the platform in February 2012 marks Ashikajima as the easternmost railway station in the Kantō region.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
The name "Ashikajima" literally translates as "sea-lion island": colonies of several hundred sea lions were observed off the nearby coast as late as the 1950s, with the offshore island giving the station its name.