History
Gion Station opened on 1 March 1961 as a petition station on the Japanese National Railways' Kururi Line, paid for in full by local subscription at a construction cost of 1.12 million yen. It is in what is now Gion, Kisarazu, Chiba Prefecture, and originally handled only diesel-railcar passenger services at an unstaffed station. With the breakup of JNR on 1 April 1987 it became a JR East station, and it was incorporated into the Tokyo Metropolitan Area on 14 March 2009. The station has a single side platform handling up to five-car trains; it is managed remotely from Kururi Station and is unstaffed, with a station-entry-certificate vending machine on the platform. Gion is the closest non-Suica station to Tokyo Station by operational distance.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
Gion Station is the closest station to Tokyo Station, measured in operational kilometres, where Suica IC cards cannot be used — a quirky distinction reflecting the fact that the Kururi Line was not included in JR East's Suica rollout despite its proximity to greater Tokyo.