Musashi-Nitta Station (RotW)

RotW is my Railways of the Warrior project. Visiting all the Japanese train stations with Fuji in the name & the 12 castles with the original keep still standing wasn’t enough to satisfy my love of lists, so now I’m working through all the stations with Musashi in their name.

Click this link for more info.

Name in kanji : 武蔵新田
Kanji meaning: reclaimed land used for rice fields
Station opened : 1st November, 1923 (as Nitta; renamed in June 1924)
Trainlines: Tokyu Tamagawa
# Passengers daily : 27,000
Distance from CityHillsAndSea HQ: 43km
Located in: Ota, Tokyo

Things to Do

Not a whole lot of note, except for Nitta Shrine.

If you feel particularly energetic, you could walk down to the river and take in the sights – like the Tamagawa incineration plant & the headquarters of not one but two Japanese companies: Canon & Hakuyosha.

(You might not know that last one, they’re dry cleaners. There’s apparently a museum at their HQ, but COVID has ruined opening hours, as I’m sure you can imagine.)

NB: I feel it would be remiss of me not to point out that Shimo-Maruko station is likely much closer to the latter three options.

All About Musashi Nitta Station

Musashi-Nitta is along the Tokyu Tamagawa line, which may sound familiar to those of you who read the above section carefully. The Tamagawa is the river which separates Kanagawa prefecture from Tokyo, its banks lined with sports fields and parks… and a fair few kofun scattered hither and thither, although not quite on the Sakitama scale.

The Tokyu train company operates the Tamagawa line – one of its seven – between Kamata station in the south and Futako-Tamagawa station to the north, and it threads its way from Ota ward to Setagaya through the neighbourhoods on the eastern banks of the river.

Musashi-Nitta is a fairly non-descript little station in one of these neighbourhoods, about halfway along the line.

The main attraction here is the aforementioned Nitta shrine, founded in response to a series of unfortunate events which were believed to have been caused by one particularly unfortunate action – the assassination of a local samurai by his rivals in 1358. Nitta Yoshioki set off to cross the river in what would turn out to be a booby-trapped boat, and then he and his retainers were massacred as the boat sank. Despicable.

This most unseemly attack resulted in the angry spirits of the dead returning and terrorizing the area with lightning strikes & fireballs. The locals decided that building a shrine was the best option to placate the ghosts, and I suppose it must have worked because there’s still a shrine here nearly 700 years later.

Then again, one of the star attractions of the shrine is a lucky tree that’s survived a lightning strike and a World War II firebombing, so who’s to say how much of a reduction in bad juju the building of the shrine realistically achieved?

As if having a lucky tree wasn’t enough, Nitta shrine also has a giant installation of a lucky arrow for your delight and entertainment. (Arrows are often purchased from shrines at New Year to bring good luck in the following months.)