History
Haya Station is on JR West's Kinokuni Line (Kisei Main Line) in Haya-Matsubara, Tanabe, Wakayama Prefecture. The station opened on 8 November 1932 with the extension of the Japanese Government Railways Kisei-Saisen between Minabe and Kii-Tanabe; the unified Kisei Main Line was completed end-to-end on 15 July 1959, freight handling was discontinued on 1 October 1971, parcel handling ended on 1 April 1978, the station became unstaffed on 14 March 1985, JR West took over with national-railway privatisation on 1 April 1987, and ICOCA became accepted on 14 March 2020. The station retains a long-standing wooden station building, and according to Tanabe's Wikipedia article, the city is Wakayama's second-largest by population and economy, the largest in the Kinki region by area (the only Kinki municipality over 1,000 km²), and is known as "Kuchi-Kumano" — the gateway where the Nakahechi and Ōhechi routes of the Kumano Kodō pilgrimage paths diverge, recognised in the UNESCO World Heritage "Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range."
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-25.
Notes
Haya is one of three notably hard-to-read station names on the Kinokuni Line — the station article cites it alongside Asso (朝来) and Shimizu-ura (冷水浦) as the line's well-known nandoku-eki (difficult-to-read stations).