[lxgr]

It’s not quite the same, but if you tap your IC card with a preloaded Shinkansen ticket, you at least get a rapidly printed seat indicator :)

Another cool thing about the paper tickets is that you can supposedly insert them stacked (i.e. both Shinkansen and regional transit ticket at a transit gate), and the gate will figure out which one to eat and which one to hand back to you!

[notpushkin]

Hmm, I thought you can preload a transit ticket but still need to buy a paper-only Shinkansen seat ticket :thinking:

And yeah, the ticket unstacking feature is really neat! (and probably it’s one of the reasons they want to replace the paper tickets – it’s a pretty complex machine on the inside :-)