History
Hodogaya Station (JO 12 / JS 12) is on JR East's Tōkaidō Main Line (Yokosuka Line track and Shōnan-Shinjuku Line) in Iwai-chō, Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama. It opened on 11 July 1887 as Hodogaya Station (then written 程ヶ谷) when the Tōkaidō Main Line was extended between the original Yokohama (today Sakuragichō) and Kōzu, with a Western-style station building on the west side. Through the Meiji and Taishō eras the station played a role in the route shake-up that followed the Sino-Japanese War and the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, becoming the southern terminus of the Tōkaidō freight bypass. On 1 October 1931 it was renamed Hodogaya, on 15 March 1930 it switched to the electrified Yokosuka Line which became the only line stopping there, and on 1 October 1980 the SM-separation moved the platforms onto the dedicated Yokosuka Line tracks via the former freight line. The current bridge-style station building entered service on 1 February 1981.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-06-09.
Notes
The name 'Hodogaya' has two competing folk etymologies: ethnographer Yanagita Kunio argued it derives from 'hodo' (an old word for female genitalia) describing the valley's shape, while another theory traces it to the ancient Hangaya Mikuriya estate covering today's Asahi and Hodogaya wards, with 'hangaya' shifting over time to 'hodogaya'.