How to reserve seats at the ticket machine for bullet train/shinkansen and other express trains in Japan with a JR Pass. Filmed in 2023.
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If you have a Japan Rail Pass, it’s free to make seat reservations. You can reserve seats at the ticket machine or at the counter in the ticket office (Midori no Madoguchi) of any JR station in Japan (on a train line run by Japan Railways). It can be busy at the counter, so here’s a walkthrough of how to make reservations for seats on the machine. The benefit of reserving a seat is you can get the space for luggage at the end of the carriage. If it’s busy, you can also make sure you can sit together and travel at the time you want. Note that it’s not just for the shinkansen; you can also reserve seats on other long distance trains and limited express trains. If you have a green car pass, making reservations is compulsory. The video also includes tips and things to watch out for, how to find the ticket machine at the station in Japan, plus general information about taking luggage and large suitcases on the bullet train.
00:00 Intro
00:38 Finding the ticket machine
01:16 Ticket machine walkthrough
05:12 Tips & advice
08:28 Do you need to reserve?
01:09 Surprise at the station
11:12 Changing/cancelling reservations
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18 Comments
You are a excellent concierge for foreign tourists visiting Japan. 🤗
Awesome job Amy see you in two weeks.
Thanka as always, it was so helpful and clear! Been stressing about reserving seats especially since we'll travel on the shinkansen train on the day after we arrive. This definitely helped my worries go away. Do you know if it's possible to book seats online before activating the JR pass?
Thanks!
just what i needed to know 🙂
Useful tip!!!
Friends and I gonna exchange our basic 7 day JR passes during a Wednesday in Sept trip so hopefully won't be too busy so we can get them to do it at the counter plus book the tickets hopefully so it'll be less headachey to do it with a person there we can walk through the times (we researched and catalogued already what times we wanna get) we wanna get shinkansen for (to get to other cities then back). Cause we gonna need 4 tickets it's gonna be less hassle to do through a person rather then fiddling with the machine for a good 10+ minutes having to repeat stuff haha
edit: i mean 4 cities worth of tickets (to kyoto, to okayama, to osaka, back to tokyo) and 3 of us travelling. so yeahhhhhh lol
Nice information here Amy & thanks for sharing! 👍💂♂
This is such a useful video.
Pro tip: if you say soomema-sen a japanese fellow will pop out of somewhere and guide you to your destination by foot. It doesn't matter if that's 1 min away or 400 miles away either. They will get you there and at the end they will give you a delightful wave and a bow. It's customary to tip these guys with minty psyduck pokemon cards from the 90s. They can then exchange these cards for various nourishing potions which boost their life-force.
QUESTION…. I bought tickets through smartEX for the bullet train. Do I need to pick up tickets at the machine when I get there? And I bought them from Kyoto to Tokyo, however now I need to get off at Shinagawa instead. Do I need to do anything to change that? I’m assuming we can just get off early, no big deal?
Wheres the best place to buy the pass in the UK? Theres so many 🙂
What are the stamps and the stamp book?
super helpful! thank you!
Thank you for going through everything so calmly & clearly, that is really useful!
I was just wondering though if buying tickets without a JR pass could be done at such a machine as well? JR pass likely won't make sense for me to get when I go to Japan so I'll have to buy shinkansen tickets separately.
Very well explained Amy. As you said, there are various types of ticket machines you can use to reserve seats and in different parts of Japan the machines are different colours! They are normally bright colours such as orange, light blue, light green, etc. but the simple thing to look for is the bottom line on the screen says "JAPAN RAIL PASS" – if it says that then you can use it to reserve a seat.
Back in October the machines actually asked if you were travelling with large luggage and you pressed a button for yes or no – that then gave you seats at the front or rear of a car. Only some of the machines have the passport scanner – on those you can press a button to type in the passport number instead, so on those you can either scan or type the number in, whichever you prefer.
As you did, the only way to cancel or change a reservation is to go to any booking office (with the green seat logo). Knowing the Japanese phrase helps, but if you show them the ticket(s) and say "change" or "cancel" they generally know what you want to do. Fully agree with showing them a screenshot if you are making a reservation at a ticket counter, this always worked for me in the past even though the screenshot was in English – "Japan Travel by Navitime" is currently the best app to use.
There used to be heaps of stations (both JR and other companies) with those stamps, but the number of them has decreased over time. Occasionally they will have a "stamp rally" (they have posters advertising them at stations, only in Japanese but Google Translate fixes that) where they have special stamps at specific stations and if you get a certain number of the stamps you get a small prize. There was one while I was visiting about 5 years ago and I collected a few stamps and got 2 postcards as a prize!
If you are booking seats for a journey where you have to change trains – e.g. going from Hakata to Nagasaki on the new Shinkansen line where you have to change trains at Takeo-Onsen – you can do it as one reservation. You select the start station for your journey and the final destination station and it will show you the various options and you pick the one you want. It will print out 1 seat reservation ticket for each person for each train.
I am thinking of paying the extra money to buy it direct from JR just to be able to reserve online. I am trying to keep things as simple as possible.