History
Kami Tanoura Station opened on 10 October 1952 as an intermediate stop on Japanese National Railways' Kagoshima Main Line, in what is now the town of Ashikita, Kumamoto Prefecture. Operated under contract from 1962 and unstaffed year-round from 1990 after its wooden station building was demolished and replaced by a log-cabin-style bicycle shelter, it became seasonal staffing-only in summer for beachgoers heading to neighbouring Koganegahama Beach. The station passed to JR Kyushu at privatisation on 1 April 1987, and on 13 March 2004 — the day the partial Kyushu Shinkansen opened — the parallel Yatsushiro–Sendai section of the Kagoshima Main Line was transferred to the third-sector Hisatsu Orange Railway, taking the station with it.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-22.
Notes
The station's log-cabin building is not a station building at all but a bicycle shelter built in 1990 on the footprint of the original wooden depot — passers-by routinely mistake it for the depot itself.