History
Niizato Station opened on 15 December 1953 on the JNR Hakubi Line in what was then the village of Shingō, Okayama Prefecture (now part of Niimi). Although the railway had reached the area in December 1926, no station was originally provided and locals had to cross a mountain pass to use Kami-Iwami Station in neighbouring Tottori Prefecture. Postwar petitioning by the village mayor and roughly 3.2 million yen raised from the sale of village forest timber funded the construction. The original platform stood about 100 metres north of the current site, and the station was relocated in February 1972 during the line's double-tracking and electrification. JR West took over operations on 1 April 1987.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
Construction of the station was funded largely by selling timber from the village's communal forest after locals' decades-long campaign to bring rail service inside the village boundary.