History
Tamarai opened on 30 November 1925 as the new western terminus of an extension of Japanese Government Railways' Inukai Light Rail Line. On 2 December 1928 the line met the eastward-pushing Miyaji Line from Kumamoto, completing a through route between the two prefectural capitals; the merged corridor was renamed the Hōhi Main Line. Until the early 1960s the station was a busy freight handler, but traffic collapsed after the local forestry office closed in January 1962; freight ended and the station became unstaffed on 1 October 1971. JR Kyushu took over at the 1 April 1987 privatisation, and a new wooden station building was completed 20 m east of the original on 1 March 1993.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
The current wooden station building, opened in 1993, was deliberately styled to resemble the priest's office of nearby Ōgimori Inari shrine — one of Japan's ten major Inari shrines.