History
Gōkaku Station opened on 10 June 1927 as Goka Station, one of the original stops on the Ōigawa Railway's main line between Kanaya and Yokooka. It served Goka Village (later absorbed into Kanaya Town, then into Shimada in 2005). Beginning in 2014 a local revitalisation group placed an unofficial "Gōkaku" (lit. "pass an exam") signboard at the station to encourage exam candidates. Building on that campaign, the Ōigawa Railway formally renamed the stop Gōkaku Station on 12 November 2020, on the same day the adjacent new Kadode Station opened — yielding a marketable run of three lucky-name stops (Higiri, Gōkaku, Kadode).
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
The station's rename in 2020 paired with the adjacent new Kadode Station produced a sequence — Higiri ("hand-cut", from a local Jizō), Gōkaku ("pass"), Kadode ("setting out") — promoted by the operator as auspiciously evoking a student's journey through exams into adult life.