After Tamoto Station, our final destination for the day was Kowada Station.
I’m afraid I only have a superficial knowledge of train travel, but I’ve heard that this station is particularly remote even among the many “hidden” stations on the Iida Line.
It’s far from the nearest village (I heard it’s an hour’s walk to the nearest one), and there’s no road that you can approach by car, so you can only get there by train. And the trains don’t come very often.
Unless you plan your travel in and out of the area very carefully, it’s certainly not a station you can drop in at casually.
Anyway, I’ve arrived.
The old wooden station building is directly connected to the platform.
It looks like it’s falling apart, but maybe it won’t be rebuilt again.
From the front of the station building. The station name sign is hard to see because of the shadows.
By the way, the surname of the current Empress before her marriage was Owada, and this station is read as Kowada. The way it is read is different, but the same kanji is written.
Perhaps because of this, it became a bit of a topic when she got married, and it seems that it attracted a reasonable number of visitors, and there are still a few remnants of this today.
The inside of the station building is old, but it has been well maintained and there is no sense of it being ‘run down’.
However, although it looks small, the sign “Caution: Mountain Leech outside waiting room” was enough to make me, a city-bred weakling, jump.
From a different angle.
After carefully examining the diamond, I discovered that if I chose this time, just before sunset, I could stop by for a short time.
So, the time limit for my stay in Kōwada on this day was 12 minutes.
I managed to take these photos before the time limit, but I wasn’t able to walk around the area away from the station.
As expected, there wasn’t enough time, and the mountain leech was scary (lol).
I’m a little disappointed, but I’ll just be glad that I was able to stop by.
From here, I’ll head north to the inn I’ve booked near Iida Station. I’m a little cold, so I think I’ll have some hot ramen.
