Great video, thank you for pointing them out!
Wow— so much info in the video!
Back in 2015, my husband and son left their luggage at Osaka train station in “coin lockers”. Not sure if they still exist. It did enable them to do sightseeing after their Kyoto stay, on the way back to airport.
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I actually had watched that video and about a dozen others of their after the original link above. I still feel like it didn’t answer my exact questions for my unique situation, which isn’t surprising – interesting videos overall. I do know from the video that I could store our luggage at the station if that becomes the best option, just wasn’t sure if there was a better one.
What are the sizes of the suitcases you plan to bring? Most Japanese trains are not equipped to store large bulky suitcases.
Luggage in Japan.
You can have large suitcases forwarded from Tokyo directly to Kyoto and just bring backpacks/carryons for the one day in Hiroshima.
Suica is happiest with AmEx. Keep your bags small. It makes life SO much easier. Have fun!
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We put our luggage in a locker at the train station our last day in Kyoto. Saw things all morning then took an afternoon train to our next stop. They had a locker big enough for two big suitcases. There were tons of them in various sizes.
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Agree that having smaller bags that fit in airplane overhead bins in Japan make life much easier since things are more compact and space is a premium. You will be glad you pack light and small.
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We’ll each have a US plane spec carry on (but close to the max of that spec) and some kind of small backpack (think laptop bag) each.
Having the bags skip the Hiroshima leg might be a tough sell for a couple of the people in our group.
Another idea would be to ship some bags and carry the remainder? Just throwing out ideas. What we did was put a bunch of stuff that we didn’t need into a duffle and shipped that. The remainder stayed with us and was carried onto our transport. Our travel companions did the “ship the luggage and keep a daypack for one day’s worth of stuff” technique.
(we also used and loved the station lockers)
One thing to think about when either checking bags or shipping bags: I always carry on enough to go for 24 hours. I have had bags delayed many times, but they have always shown up within about 26 hours (enough time for them to take the same flight the next day and then be delivered to my hotel or in one case to my home).
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Our plan is ship our two large pieces of luggage from Tokyo to Kyoto keeping a small duffel with us on the Nozomi Train. Originally we were going to keep the luggage with us and book the green car seats with space for oversized luggage but felt shipping might make for an easier day.
We purchased our Nozomi seats ourselves using a new app. Was actually pretty easy. We’ll see how it goes next week!
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Traveled extensively in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and HK over the last year. The regular T-Mobile data included in the standard plans worked perfectly in all 4.
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My friend says T-Mobile regular data was painfully slow in HK. But in my experience, HK has public Wifi available in shopping malls and parks.
It does work fine until you run out of the 5 gigs of data. We were there for 18 days and used close to 15 gigs.
What is the exact name of the app you used for Nozomi seats? Thanks.
Shinkansen smart EX
Apple Store
Thanks. Wow, the 1.6/5 rating and reviews are pretty brutal. Sounds like you had no issues with it?
Getting your credit card approved was difficult. There are lots of threads out there about it. It’s because of the added layer of security they use in authentication. We tried every credit card we had - we’ were successful using my last, oldest card.
Once authorized, the app works great.
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Actually, I can confirm one of the frequent criticisms in the reviews now. I tried it with 2 credit cards and it failed with both. Each time you have the restart the entire registration processes many screens. The card info was good. From the reviews it sounds like this is a frequent issue. Bummer. Seems like I can’t use the app without a credit card verification and that’s not going to work…