History
Kimmeiji Station opened on 27 September 1990 on the JR West Gantoku Line between Hashirano and Kuga, in a rural corner of what was then Kuga, Yamaguchi Prefecture. It was a petition station: the local "New Station Promotion Association" funded its entire construction at a cost of about 25 million yen, and it remains the only station the Gantoku Line has gained since the JR-era reorganisation. The site has been unstaffed from the start, with no station building, only a single side platform on an embankment and a small prefabricated waiting room. The 2006 merger that created the second-generation city of Iwakuni shifted the address to Iwakuni-shi.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
Kimmeiji is the only new station the Gantoku Line has gained since JR West took over in 1987; locals paid the full ~25 million yen construction cost themselves to bring it about.