Urgent help re travel in Japan

[PanickingNowHelpPlease]

Not an AIBU but posting here for traffic. We travel to Japan on 30 July and have bought Green J Passes to travel around the country. However, for some of our routes we have gone on to book seats and there are no seats on the trains available. We have accommodation booked and driving is not an option. Can someone with knowledge of trains in Japan offer any advice as to who we would contact/how we might be able to resolve this please. We are really panicking. We are a family of five and even the seats we have managed to book aren’t together.

Oof, that's unfortunate that it's fully booked up. Have you checked earlier and later trains for spaces? You can still use the ordinary and unreserved train carriages using green pass (but of course, that's not what you've paid extra for!). You can also pay an extra fee and use the Gran carriages, which might be worth it if it's only for a few routes. There are so many shinkansen running that there must be seats on one somewhere, even if it requires juggling your timings and plans a bit.

I wouldn't worry about not sitting together, people are polite and self contained so kids should be fine of you check on them,.BUT make sure you have an exit strategy (shinkansen expect you to be up and out immediately upon reaching your station, so plan to get up, get kids/bags and stand somewhere unobtrusively to disembark together).

JR seats can usually be booked a month in advance, and early/mid August is a peak holiday week in Japan. If you have a green pass and there are no seats on any of the trains you want I guess you could look at standard class? Or alternatively throw yourself at the mercy of the JR staff at a the nearest main station when you arrive? They might be able to point you in the direction of alternative routes, perhaps using non Shinkansens for part of the journey. Public transport in Japan is very good, so there will be a way. But, holiday season is very busy and seat reservations on the fast routes go quickly. Good luck!

And to book/manage our shinkansen trips, I went to the shinkansen desk in Tokyo station. It might be worth it when you arrive, to visit a shinkansen desk and organise it all a few days before you need to take the train?

The staff spoke very good English and helped to streamline it all. I was only using standard tickets, so they should offer additional help seeing as you have a better class of ticket.

Try not to worry too much! They are incredibly organised and very helpful, and you will have the time of your life (and even if it truly cannot be sorted, which I doubt, the standard shinkansen carriage is still vastly better than our trains 😅 ) ⛩️🍡

Thanks both. We feel really silly as we are experienced travellers and travel abroad by train all the time, but have never had a seat booking issue (often we’ve never even booked until the day of travel). Husband has now managed to get seats on all train (not all green but it’s fine). However we have not managed to find any with oversize baggage. What happens if we just board with our luggage - we only plan on taking two cases? Will we be fined massively?

Yes you will definitely be fined for the luggage! (and you would feel very rude doing it, it's not the done thing to try and get away with just bringing it).

Use the luggage forwarding services, Yamato is what we used. It's such a perfect handy service, your hotel will fill in the forms with you, someone picks up your luggage, you pay a very reasonable fee and then your luggage is waiting for you in your next hotel. It actually saved so much hassle not having to drag it all about. And it's totally safe, reliabke, amazing for the price!

And it leaves you free to take a little backpack and your bento box for the journey :-)

Can you not take a hand luggage case each (so 5) instead of 2 large cases? That way they don’t need oversize luggage options also

Use the forwarding service at your hotel, don’t try and bring large cases on the train

Use luggage forwarding for your luggage. It's very convenient!

If you’ve not booked the seats that come with luggage space definitely use Yamato. The space above the seats will fit travel rucksacks but not large suitcases. The luggage service is surprisingly affordable and so convenient – plus means you don’t need to drag heavy suitcases around huge, busy train stations.