Originally Posted by richarddd
We're traveling from Kyoto to Narita airport on Monday the 20th and bought seats on the Shinkansen Kyoto - Tokyo. Is it plausible that neither the 13:09 nor 13:26 Nozomi trains have a DE pair of seats available? The trains are configured DE-ABC (2-3). The ticket agent said only seats on the 3 side were available. We'd rather be on the 2 side for a 2:20 ride. If nothing else, we can check the unreserved cars.
Absolutely!
When I travelled around Japan with my family last October we weren’t able to get reserved non-smoking seats on any of the Shinkansens we wanted, nevermind two together. And finding somewhere to sit on the unreserved part of the train was a real scrum.
It seems that most people who post on this forum never have problems getting seats, but for us it was very difficult.
Don’t worry too much about having someone next to you. It’s unlikely they’ll be listening in on your conversations and more unlikely that you’ll ‘interfere’ with theirs.