How to buy Shinkansen tickets in Japan in 2026

Source: Wikimedia Commons · CC0

A Shinkansen fare is two tickets, the ride and the seat, and the machine asks about both. Answer in the wrong order and the ticket is real but useless on the train you booked.

1Two tickets, four seats

JR East sells a Shinkansen trip as a boarding ticket (乗車券, the basic fare) plus a limited express ticket (特急券). Two cards or one combined card; either way you pay both halves. The boarding ticket opens the gate, the limited express ticket buys speed and a seat.

The seat half comes in four kinds: ordinary reserved, ordinary non-reserved, Green Car and GranClass. A reserved seat needs the boarding ticket plus a reserved-seat limited express ticket. A non-reserved seat needs the boarding ticket plus a non-reserved limited express ticket, good in a non-reserved car and nowhere else. Hayabusa, Kagayaki and the Narita Express have no non-reserved car at all, so that cheaper ticket cannot be used on the trains most first trips take.

What the seat costs moves with the date. On the northbound Shinkansen the ordinary-car reserved charge runs ¥400 above the ordinary-season figure at the peak windows (Golden Week, Obon, 18–23 September, New Year), ¥200 above in the busy periods and ¥200 below in the quiet ones. A non-reserved ticket is always ¥530 below the ordinary-season reserved charge. The basic fare moved on 14 March 2026, so search the route on eki-net rather than trusting a table.

Source: Pakutaso

2Why the counter is no longer the default

JR East's buying instructions give two routes: the online site before you arrive, or the machine at the station after. The staffed counter is what is left over.

New machines went in from July 2025, about 20 stations and 160 units in the first year, built around a top menu of purposes: buy a ticket, change a ticket. The old wall of 指定席 and 自由席 buttons is the complaint the redesign answers, because nobody knows which they want before they know what the machine will ask. Existing machines took the same menus from 1 October 2025.

One gap closed that matters. Enter the conventional lines on Mobile Suica, reach Tokyo, and the machine at the Shinkansen transfer gate now sells the Shinkansen ticket; that errand used to mean a queue at a みどりの窓口. Counters still take the cases a screen will not: a refund it refuses, a fare it will not sell.

Source: Wikimedia Commons · Sakurayama 7, CC BY-SA 4.0

3The green machine, screen by screen

The walk below is JR East's screen-by-screen demo, on the screens in use from 1 October 2026, for a reserved seat.

1. Buy a ticket — the top menu's first purpose, not a seat-type button.
2. Shinkansen, then reserved seat.
3. Direction — Tohoku, Joetsu or Hokuriku.
4. Boarding station, with the nearest Shinkansen station offered first.
5. Alighting station.
6. Date — the next seven days sit on the screen, and a button opens the rest of the month.
7. Time band, not a train.
8. Passengers.
9. Train and class, with circles, triangles and crosses for how full each one is.
10. Seat — off the carriage map, or by letter.
11. The boarding-ticket question.
12. One way or return, then confirm, then cash or card.

Step eleven is the one to answer slowly. The machine asks whether you want the boarding ticket with the seat, and from which station. Say no when you hold one already: a pass, or a base-fare ticket bought for an earlier leg of the same journey. Say yes when you do not, because a limited express ticket on its own will not open the outer gate. JR East will sell it to you without a word of warning and leave you at the barrier.

Then the train. Where there is no non-reserved car, the seat type is decided for you, so choose the train before the seat. Payment takes cash or a credit card, and a card asks for its PIN, so a card whose PIN you do not know is a counter queue with a train leaving.

4Ekinet, before you fly

JR-EAST Train Reservation, still called eki-net, books everything on this page except a pass. Its Shinkansen e-ticket is the ticketless product: book the train, tie the booking to a transport IC card such as Suica, PASMO or Welcome Suica Mobile, and ride with nothing to collect.

The Express Train e-ticket is the smaller product. It covers the limited express half of a conventional express: Narita Express, Azusa, Fuji Excursion, Hitachi and the rest of the list on that page. The basic fare comes off your IC card or a paper ticket.

Reservations open one month before the travel date and close four minutes before departure for a Shinkansen e-ticket, six for a paper ticket. Paper has not gone anywhere: the same page offers the machine-issued ticket beside the e-ticket, so a reader who wants the physical thing can still have it.

A pass is the exception, and the site says so on the pass menu: reservations cannot be made if you are using a Japan Rail Pass. What a pass covers and costs is in the JR Pass 2026 guide. The booking email also wants data when it lands, so an eSIM bought before you fly beats the airport counter.

Source: Wikimedia Commons · Kentaro Iemoto, CC BY-SA 2.0

5Tapping in with Suica

A Suica at a Shinkansen gate can be the fare or the seat, and the two are not interchangeable. Tapped on the reader it can pay for a ride, through Touch de Go! Shinkansen. Registered to an e-ticket booking it stands in for the seat.

Touch de Go! Shinkansen covers non-reserved ordinary cars only: no reserved seat, no Green Car. It needs a one-time registration of the card before the first tap, 利用開始登録, plus enough charge for the ride. An unregistered card is refused at the gate, and the registration happens in the Mobile Suica app or at a charge-only machine, not at the barrier.

It works between Shinkansen stations inside the sections JR East lists, not at every JR East Shinkansen station. Inside four of them you may sit in a vacant reserved seat instead of standing: Sendai to Morioka, on Hayabusa, Hayate and Komachi services that stop at an intermediate station in the section; Morioka to Shin-Aomori; Morioka to Akita; and Fukushima to Shinjo. Give the seat up when its holder arrives. The two systems do not stack either: an e-ticket linked to the card wins at the gate, so pick one per journey. The card's own rules are in the Suica 2026 guide.

Source: Wikimedia Commons · Star train, CC BY-SA 4.0

6What a pass changes at the machine

A pass replaces the boarding ticket, and that changes one answer. With a pass, a reserved seat is the pass plus a seat reservation ticket, and a non-reserved car is the pass on its own. At the machine you are buying the seat, not the fare, so the boarding-ticket question is the one you answer no to.

Collection has moved too. From 1 April 2026 a Japan Rail Pass booked online can be picked up at reserved-seat machines with a passport reader, at Narita, Haneda, some Yamanote line stations and Sendai. Seat reservations for a pass are made on the pass operator's site or at a machine in the country, not on eki-net. Prices and the covered trains are in the JR Pass 2026 guide.

Source: Pakutaso

7When it goes wrong

A full train is the common failure. Take a non-reserved car where the train has one. Where it does not, JR East sells a standing ticket, 立席特急券, on Hayabusa, Komachi, Hayate, Tsubasa and Kagayaki when a train is full, charged at the ordinary-season reserved rate less ¥530, or at the special rate where one applies.

Miss the train and a reserved ticket is not lost. The machine's change flow moves it to a later service the same day, up to four tickets at once. If the Shinkansen itself runs two hours late, the machine also refunds the limited express charge without a counter visit.

Luggage changes by line. On JR East's Shinkansen no reservation is needed: up to 250cm in total, 30kg, two items, free, on the rack or at your feet. The Tokaido, Sanyo and Kyushu lines set their own oversized-luggage rules, and JR East hands you to those operators rather than applying its own, so a very large case can need a particular seat chosen at booking. Sending the case ahead is in the luggage forwarding guide.

What a machine cannot fix goes to a 話せる指定席券売機, a reserved-seat machine with a live operator on the screen. It issues, changes and refunds the tickets the plain machine refuses, and shows how many people are ahead of you. The operator works from 8:00 to 20:00, which is not the machine's own opening hours. Failing that, a Travel Service Center.

Source: Pakutaso

8Questions and answers

The Shinkansen ticket questions that come up at the machine.

Keep reading

JR Pass 2026: the two price lists, and which one you get Tokyo in three days: one pass covers two operators

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