So This Is The New Year

How do you usually ring in the new year? You probably get roaringly drunk on champagne and end up trying to kiss a potted plant at the stroke of midnight. Perhaps you stay home and watch old Dick Clark on the TV. Maybe you even make a resolution to stop trying to kiss so many potted plants. Well, my alcoholic, plant-loving friend, here in Japan we do things a little differently.

One of the most common ways of ringing-in the new year, or shogatsu (literally "new month"), is mochitsuki (餅つき); the traditional making of mochi (sticky rice cakes). The tradition dates back to ancient times and is apparently seen as a means of reflecting on the self and the blessings of the Gods at the end of a year.

These days, most Japanese do not make their own mochi and simply buy kagami mochi (lit. "mirror mochi") to eat during the new year. For this reason, mochi has become something of a seasonal industry, with many companies competing to produce more ornate and elaborate kagami mochi gift sets. These sets are available in many different styles: everything from traditional ornamentation to plastic hello kitties adorn the containers that hold the mochi. Below you'll see one of many mochi displays at Jusco. From what I've seen, mochi sets normally range from about $3 to $30 USD.

Well, we were all sitting around in the office last week when Baba-San realized I had probably never participated in mochitsuki. Right she was. Well, since most schools perform mochitsuki at the end of the year, she immediately set to calling all of my schools to find out if I could participate. Unfortunately, all four schools had already had their mochitsuki celebrations, since school let out this week for winter break. Luckily, Baba-San thought to call the local day-care center, who were more than happy to have me join in their mochitsuki provided that I agreed to teach a simple English lesson while there. So this morning, Okubo-San and I set out for the snowy outskirts of Momoishi to track down the day-care center.
Mochi begins its life as ordinary rice. Well, I'm told that it's a special kind of rice and it is left to soak overnight before it's steamed. But it looks just like plain old rice to me. The rice is first dumped into a huge mortar (usu) in preparation for the mochi making.
The rice is then pounded with a comically-oversized mallet (kine), folded over, wet (to avoid sticking to the mallet) and then pounded again. Fun fact: you know how we see a "man in the moon"? Well, the Japanese see a rabbit pounding mochi instead.

At the day-care, the teachers and I did all of the real pounding ("It's all in the hips," I was advised by one teacher) and afterwards the kids were allowed to take a crack at it with a smaller mallet, mainly so that the teachers could take photos of them being cute.
After the rice had been sufficiently pound into a sticky paste, it was kneaded and rolled flat.
Then, it was cut into small squares.
These small squares were then handed out to the children, who further kneaded and stretched them out.
The teachers had pre-prepared small balls of sweetened red-bean paste for mochi filling and after the kids had sufficiently stretched out their square, they were each given a ball of the paste.

Finally, with the paste in the middle of the mochi, the ball was rolled until it took the form of a sphere and was then ready to eat. While I used to buy ice-cream mochi quite frequently in Chicago, I've developed something of a distaste for mochi since coming to Japan. This is most likely due to the fact that I get various types of mochi given to me as omiyage quite frequently and all of them are disgusting. So I was surprised to find that the handmade red-bean paste mochi ball was actually quite good.

After the mochitsuki was done, the teachers invited me to stay and eat lunch with the six year-olds. In the spirit of mochi making, lunch featured two types of mochi in addition to a soup, vegetables and a clementine. One type of mochi was covered in sweet green stuff and the other had some sort of liquified seaweed on the top. This was more like the mochi that I was used to, which meant that I had to fight my gag reflex and choke it down while listening to one of the teachers tell me about how much he likes baseball.