History
Yasaka Station opened on 1 July 1952 as Hanzai Station (半在駅) on the Japanese National Railways' Etsumi-Nan Line, as a passenger-only unstaffed infill station, in what is now the city of Gujō, Gifu Prefecture. When the Etsumi-Nan Line was transferred from JNR to the third-sector Nagaragawa Railway on 11 December 1986, it became a Nagaragawa Railway station. The station was renamed Yasaka (八坂) on 1 April 2006. A signboard reading "Nihon Man-Naka no Eki" (literally "Station in the Exact Middle of Japan") was added to the platform in December 1993 to publicise the proximity to Japan's population centre of gravity. It is station 17 on the line.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
Yasaka markets itself as "the station in the exact middle of Japan" because of its proximity to the country's calculated demographic centre of gravity — the signboard advertising this was installed in December 1993, more than a decade before the station's rename from Hanzai to Yasaka.