History
Hotarugaike Station opened on 25 April 1910 as Hotaru-ga-ike Station on the Mino-Arima Electric Tramway, the predecessor of today's Hankyu Railway, about a month after the Takarazuka Main Line itself began running. The current Hankyu station building was completed on 30 September 1994. The Osaka Monorail platforms above opened on 1 April 1997 as part of the extension west to Osaka International (Itami) Airport, finally turning Hotarugaike into a junction. Express services began calling here on 30 August 2003. Station numbering HK-47 was introduced across the Hankyu network on 21 December 2013, and platform screen doors followed on the monorail in December 2019 and on Hankyu in March 2025.
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
Founder Ichizō Kobayashi rejected the geographically obvious name "Asada" for being dull and instead borrowed the name of a nearby firefly-viewing pond about 400 metres northeast of the station.