At the end of the line, love blossoms

When the idea of love at the first sight occurs to many Chinese in their early 30s, a scene that is likely to flash through their minds is of a teenage boy and a girl glimpsing one another from either side of a seaside road crossing, their sight of one another then being broken by a passing tourist mini train.

The scene is from Slam Dunk, a Japanese animation series about high-school basketball players in a small city near Tokyo that was broadcast in Japan between 1993 and 1996, and in China and other Asian countries soon after.

It was in Kamakura, 65 kilometers southwest of Tokyo, that the series was set. It has thus become a destination of pilgrimage for Chinese who went to high school in the late 1990s. Many couples, my cousin and her husband included, went on their honeymoon to Japan, and of course Kamakura was on the itinerary.