History
Sōbudai-mae Station is an Odakyu Electric Railway stop on the Odawara Line in Zama, Kanagawa Prefecture, 36.9 km from the line's Tokyo terminus at Shinjuku. It opened on 1 April 1927 as Zama Station, then was renamed Shikan-gakkō-mae Station on 1 June 1937 to mark the nearby Imperial Japanese Army Academy. As wartime censorship pushed military place-names off civilian maps, it was renamed again to Sōbudai-mae on 1 January 1941. Station numbering assigned it OH30 in January 2014. The station has two island platforms serving four tracks beneath an elevated station building reached by footbridge, and is the closest stop to the United States Army's Camp Zama.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
The 1941 renaming was part of a wartime counter-intelligence push to remove military-installation names from public maps.