History
Kowada Station opened on 30 December 1936 as the temporary northern terminus of the privately built Sanshin Railway, extending into the steep gorges along the Tenryū River in present-day Tenryū-ku, Hamamatsu. The Sanshin line was nationalised on 1 August 1943 and folded into the Iida Line. Freight handling ceased in December 1971 and the station has been unstaffed since February 1984. JR Central took over at the 1987 privatisation of JNR, and in 2008 one of the original pair of opposed side platforms was decommissioned, leaving a single side platform served by a wooden building.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-06-09.
Where the English and Japanese sources differ, this account follows the Japanese source.
Notes
Kowada is among Japan's best-known hikyō or "remote" stations: there is no road access, the nearest house is a 40-to-50-minute walk away, and ranking lists routinely place it among the country's top three most isolated stops.