The platforms are marked for where the cars would stop and color coded (yellow for the nozomi shinkansen, red for hikari, etc.). Your ticket lists car and seat number, so you just line up in front of the marking on the platform.
View inside the shinkansen car. The seats swivel 180 degrees, so if you have a party of 4, you can swivel one row of seats to make the two rows face each other.
Wifi is available on the shinkansen. Pretty cool.... I counted 5 different services. Not sure what it costs, but being wired is on a whole different level in Japan. We are in the stone age in the US.
No, it's not the blue strip on the side of the train. There are these digital displays on the side of the train (not visible in the picture) that are colored yellow, red, etc. and they also have they also say nozomi or hikari or whatever. That's how you can tell what train it is.
Plus, large displays on the platform display which train just arrived at the station, which one is about to, etc. The arrivals are to the minute, i.e. the next train may be coming at 9:31 and the next train after that at 9:38, etc. The trains arrive at precisely the minute they are supposed to, so it is impossible to confuse the trains with one another.
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