History
Akaike began on 1 April 1904 as a branch-point on the Kyushu Railway for a freight spur to Akaike Station (later Akaike Coal-Mine Station, 1937). The Kyushu Railway was nationalised on 1 July 1907. On 18 August 1910 the spot was demoted to 'Akaike Signal Stop', renamed 'Akaike Junction' on 1 February 1911, then 'Akaike Signal Point' on 1 April 1922. It was promoted to a full passenger station as Akaike Station on 25 June 1937. Freight handling started on 15 July 1955, ended on 1 February 1965; the spur to Akaike Coal-Mine closed on 31 March 1978. The station became unstaffed on 1 February 1984, passed to JR Kyushu at the 1 April 1987 privatisation, and was transferred to the Heisei Chikuhō Railway on 1 October 1989. From June 2017 the local Harada Eye Clinic took naming-rights, and the station now bears the subtitle 'Harada Ganka Akaike Station'.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
When the Chikuhō Kōgyō Railway was originally laid, the plan was to terminate the spur at Akaike. But the village was at the time a transfer point where coal arrived by small river-boat from neighbouring towns and was reloaded onto larger Gohēta riverboats; the boatmen and the riverside inns made a living from that trade and successfully blocked the railway from putting a station there. The railway was instead extended to Kanada, which gained the station — and the prosperity that came with it. Akaike townspeople later petitioned the Kyushu Railway for their own station, but the town's history records this as something that 'set back the development of Akaike Town'.