History
Kottoi Station opened on 9 September 1928 with the extension of the then Kogushi Line — the line was renamed the San'in Main Line on 24 February 1933 — from Takibe to Agawa, with both passenger and freight services. Freight handling ceased on 1 August 1961 and parcels on 20 December 1971, when the station was downgraded from a direct-run JNR station to a simple agency station. With the privatisation of Japanese National Railways on 1 April 1987 it passed to JR West. Storm flooding on the Awano River bridge on 1 July 2023 forced suspension between Nagatoshi and Kogushi; service through Kottoi was restored on 27 September 2025, with the same pre-disaster frequency of eleven trains per day.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
The station name 'Kottoi' is widely flagged as one of Japan's hardest place names to read; it likely derives from a regional word for cow (牝牛, meushi → kottoi) or from a nearby Sea of Japan inlet called Kotoe, and was also a stock pillow-word for imperial cattle pastures in classical poetry.