A departure lobby at Tokyo’s Haneda airport is crowded on Aug. 9, 2025, with passengers heading to their hometowns or resorts for Japan’s Bon holiday. (Kyodo)
TOKYO (Kyodo) — Japan’s summer holiday travel rush got underway Saturday, with many shinkansen bullet train services and flights fully booked as people returned to their hometowns or set off on domestic and overseas vacations.
JR Tokyo Station was crowded from the early morning as all seats on the Nozomi shinkansen bullet train services to the major metropolises of Nagoya, Osaka and Fukuoka were booked out, with long lines of passengers seeking unreserved seats on other trains.
Traffic jams snaked along the country’s expressways, while travelers at train stations crowded concourses and waiting rooms to shelter from the summer heat on the platforms.
Keisuke Nakagawa, 7, who was returning with his father to Otsu in Shiga Prefecture, western Japan, from Chiba Prefecture neighboring Tokyo, said he planned to play in the water at Lake Biwa and see his grandparents.
Throngs of people passed through JR Shin-Osaka Station on the Tokaido and Sanyo shinkansen lines in western Japan. Karin Takimura, 10, from Utsunomiya city in Tochigi Prefecture, met her father in Osaka before they set off on a family trip to Hiroshima.
“I learned about Itsukushima Shrine in school, and want to go and see it,” she said.
Yoko Nishio, 75, and her friends, all wearing matching t-shirts, were headed to western prefecture of Kochi to perform at the yosakoi dance festival there. “We’ve been practicing since June,” she said. “Even though it is supposed to rain, we hope to enjoy dancing.”
A malfunction of the E8-series shinkansen trains in June had led to a reduction in the number of direct trains between Tokyo and northeastern Yamagata Prefecture, with regular services resuming only at the beginning of the month.
“It is challenging to make transfers with small children,” said Takamichi Okudaira, 36, at JR Yamagata Station on his way home to Sagae in the prefecture with his family after coming from Saitama, near Tokyo. “I am grateful to be able to make it here directly.”
Rail operators said Tokaido Shinkansen bookings were nearly full on Saturday morning for bullet trains departing from Tokyo.
While regular trains on the Yamagata Shinkansen are operating normally, the number of extraordinary services has decreased, with operators calling for passengers to spread out their travel dates.
All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines flights departing from Tokyo’s Haneda airport were fully booked out on routes to Okinawa Prefecture in southern Japan, where the new theme park Junglia Okinawa opened last month.
Departure flights from the Narita airport, the other hub serving the capital, were also robust.
AloJapan.com