History
Kōfu Station opened on 11 June 1903 as the terminus of a government railway extension from Hatsukano (today's Kai-Yamato) and was extended to Nirasaki on 15 December the same year. In March 1928 the privately owned Fuji-Minobu Railway connected Ichikawa-Daimon to Kōfu, a line nationalised on 1 May 1941 as the Minobu Line. The original station building burned down on 27 December 1924 and a second-generation building opened on 4 April 1925. Freight handling ended on 1 February 1984 and an overhead station building opened on 21 August the same year. The 1 April 1987 privatisation placed Chūō Main Line operations under JR East and the Minobu Line under JR Central, making Kōfu a boundary station between the two operators.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-06-09.
Notes
The station building sits on the former site of Kōfu Castle's Shimizu-guruwa enclosure, which contained turrets, a study hall and gates before the castle was abolished in the Meiji era and its inner moat filled in.