History
Awa-Kainan Station opened on 1 October 1973 as an intermediate stop when Japanese National Railways extended the Mugi Line from Mugi to Kaifu, in what is now Kaiyō, Tokushima Prefecture. It became a simple-commission stop in November 1974 and was made unstaffed in October 2005. The present passenger facility, the Awa-Kainan Station Plaza Community Centre, replaced the old station building on 30 June 2008. JR Shikoku inherited the station at the 1 April 1987 privatisation of JNR. From 1 November 2020 the Awa-Kainan-to-Kaifu segment passed to the third-sector Asa Seaside Railway as part of its Asatō Line, and Awa-Kainan became the Mugi Line's new southern terminus. DMV services began at the adjacent signal box on 25 December 2021, jointly managed by both operators.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
Awa-Kainan sits at the rail-to-road handover point of Japan's first revenue-service Dual-Mode Vehicle line: at the signal box just south of the platform, the DMV stops, drops or retracts its steel rail-wheels, and rolls onto the road as a bus to continue south through Asa Seaside Railway's network.