JR Hakubi Line Houdani Station Building

The Station Named After a Scholar

Most Japanese stations take their names from the towns or villages around them. Hokoku, on the JR Hakubi Line in the hills of Takahashi City, is different. It is named after a person: Yamada Hokoku, a Confucian scholar and samurai administrator of the late Edo period, and the small wooden station house that opened with the line in 1928 still stands on ground that was once part of his private academy.

The building faces south toward the Takahashi River, set on the left bank where the water and the valley wall press close together. A single-storey timber structure with a gabled tiled roof, it runs about 17 metres along the tracks and 6.4 metres deep. A gabled porch on the east end of the south face marks the entrance, and a simple eave shelters the north side. The base of the walls is finished in washed-out plaster, the walls above in clapboard, and the porch is given clean, straight lines that read as quietly refined rather than ornamental.

How a Man's Name Ended Up on a Signboard

Yamada Hokoku (1805 to 1877) was born nearby and served the Bitchu-Matsuyama domain. Under his lord Itakura Katsukiyo he rebuilt the domain's ruined finances, developed local products, and taught a generation of students, earning the epithet Sage of Bitchu. Among his pupils was Kawai Tsuginosuke, later the tragic leader of the Nagaoka domain in the Boshin War and the model for Shiba Ryotaro's novel The Pass. The station grounds sit on the site of Hokoku's Nagase academy, where he taught.

When the railway came, officials planned to call the stop Nakai, after the village. Local people wanted the scholar's name instead. The Railway Ministry refused, having no precedent for naming a station after a person. So the residents devised an argument: nearby was a place called Nishikata, "the western valley," and read a certain way those characters could be taken as a location rather than a name. On that pretext the ministry relented, and the station became Hokoku. It is often described as the first station in Japan to carry a person's name, and after the railways were privatised the local wish was finally honoured openly, the station now acknowledged as named for the man himself.

What to Look For on a Visit

The registration of the building as a Tangible Cultural Property in 2011 recognised how well it preserves the look of a Hakubi Line station from the line's opening years, a form that contributes to the historic character of the landscape. Inside, the ticket window and the small-baggage counter remain, and the wooden sliding doors were never replaced with aluminium. Unstaffed since 1984, the station has been kept clean and intact by local residents, so the window that once handled tickets still waits as if a stationmaster might appear.

In 2016 a small room on the platform end of the building was opened as the Hokoku Station Archive, with panels and pamphlets about the scholar; from it visitors can also enter the old office, where a model of the station and photographs from its opening are shown. The platform itself is an island platform set higher than the building, reached by an underpass and a short flight of steps, a layout dictated by the narrow riverside site.

The setting rewards a slow look. Across the river, along National Route 180, stands the "Looking-Back Nettle Tree," where Kawai Tsuginosuke is said to have turned and bowed three times toward his teacher on leaving. A stone on the hillside marks the site of Hokoku's former residence. For anyone drawn to the currents of Japanese history, the station is a doorway into a remarkable local story.