Pile driving mochi

ONE OF THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS of traditional Japanese religious observances is mochi, a highly glutinous variety of rice that is steamed, pounded into a gummy mass that resembles dough, and then either cut into squares or shaped into round cakes.

It would be difficult to find someone in Japan who hasn’t eaten mochi, which is invariably made at New Year’s. The rounded cakes are used as holiday decorations in the home and eaten as a New Year’s treat. One of the events associated with that holiday is the mochitsuki, or mochi pounding, held a few days before.

The freshly steamed rice is placed into a mortar and whacked with a large mallet. I took part in a mochitsuki once, and that was enough–it’s hard work, which is not my idea of a something fun to do during the holidays. Also, mochi is one of those foods that I’ll eat if someone puts out for me, but won’t go out of my way to find. It tastes fine, but it’s gummy and sticky; generally speaking, the Japanese seem to enjoy foods with this consistency more than Westerners do. It also has to be carefully chewed and swallowed. Every New Year’s, there are always newspaper reports of someone choking on mochi.

Mochi pounding is not exclusively a New Year’s event, however. Just last week, on the 15th, parishioners at the Iwatowake Shinto Shrine in Shioya-machi, Tochigi Prefecture, took a lot of the sweat out of the process by using the largest mortar in Japan for a mochitsuki. The mortar is three meters in diameter and weighs 12 tons. The upper section has an eight-meter high wooden frame and a 400-kilogram pestle lifted with a rope. The folks in Shioya-machi admit they conduct the mochitsuki for the PR, but they also timed it to correspond with the date of the war’s end to incorporate their wishes for peace.

The shrine itself is just three years shy of its 1,200th anniversary and has a rebuilding project in the works. This is the last time the mochitsuki, which you can see in the photo, will be held at the present site.

The rice pounding attracted a crowd of 1,000, who made it easy on themselves by pulling the rope instead of actually pounding the rice with a mallet. This year, they wound up pounding 180 kilograms worth of mochi.

Fortunately, there were no reports of any gustatory mishaps among the citizens of Shioya-machi, so apparently they were able to swallow it all safely!

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