History
Akasaka-Mitsuke Station opened on 18 November 1938 on the Tokyo Rapid Railway, ancestor of the Ginza Line, in Akasaka, Minato, Tokyo, with its name drawn from the long-vanished Akasaka-Mitsuke gateway of Edo Castle. On 23 December 1938 a Shibuya-bound train stalled on a 33-permille gradient outside the station and rolled back into two following trains in a chain collision. Wartime land-transport rationalisation transferred the operator to the Teito Rapid Transit Authority on 1 September 1941. A Marunouchi Line station opened here on 15 March 1959, making the site a two-line interchange — a layout that had been anticipated even at construction time, when a two-level same-direction platform arrangement had been built in expectation of the second line. The Eidan operator was privatised into Tokyo Metro on 1 April 2004, the Marunouchi platforms received platform-edge doors on 19 June 2007, and a new Sannō-shita ticket barrier with Exit 11 opened on 28 August 2010 as part of a major fire-safety upgrade.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
The pre-war Tokyo Rapid Railway had already laid out Akasaka-Mitsuke as a two-level same-direction interchange in anticipation of a future line to Shinjuku — the original platforms were just 4.85 metres wide — and when the Marunouchi Line was finally added in the 1950s the older structure had to be torn out and rebuilt to widths of between 8 and 11 metres.