お餅 (o-mochi)

What does Joyce rank almost as high on the Icky List as mouthfuls of mayonnaise? Mochi!!!! Mochi is a favorite traditional Japanese food. It's made from rice... just like everything else in this country. Mochi is described as a rice cake, but this description makes it sounds
1. hard in texture
2. rather pleasant (which fails to express mochi's true nature).
OK lets be fair, many, perhaps even most(?), foreigners DO find mochi to be a swell thing, but for a texture-sensitive palate such as my own (and I know my sister Sandi will heartily agree with me on the texture business) mochi is grossy. How can I help convey the texture of mochi to those of you who have yet to feel its charms? Some mochi is harder than other mochi, but generally speaking it is very soft. Perhaps the closest sensation I can compare the chewing of mochi to is chewing a big mouthful of the silky smooth wrinkly old sags of skin hanging from your grandmothers underarm.

Mochi can be presented beautifully (these pics are lifted from the internet, btw):
...and mochi can have its true nature disguised through the artful use of shape and flavor, such as in this gift box below:

Top row, from left: Nantu mochi (filled with an, dipped in soy-bean flour), sweet-potato mochi, traditional white mochi, yaki manju (baked) and tsumami mochi (green, filled with an). Row 2: Momo (peach) mochi, furusato manju (baked with sweet-potato filling), chi chi mochi (soft, milk-flavored), plum flower (red for good luck, with red azuki-bean filling) and sweet-potato mochi.

But Japanese people like to eat mochi no matter how it comes, kind of like the Whos down in Whoville. Mochi doesn't need presents! Or ribbons! Or wrappings! The tags! And the tinsel! The trimmings! The trappings! Right. Mochi is happily devoured in the simple form of sticky rice mash rolled in soy bean powder. Absolutely no taste at all. Just grandma's jiggle, squishing between your molars. Oozing back and forth across your tongue. Clinging with sickly joy to the roof of your mouth as you desperately try to swallow the cloying mass.

Well, a few weeks ago we had a teacher`s New Years party. Mochitsuki is the name of the traditional mochi-pounding ceremony in Japan, whereby mochi is made. Except nowadays it's made by machines in large factories. But traditionally it was done in the way detailed below. This is a common activity at the New Year. For our Mochitsuki party, we rented a ginormous mochi-making mush kit! The photos below are all mine from mochi-making, but the 3 steps are not mine, I lifted them from the internet:

step 1. Polished glutinous rice is soaked overnight and cooked.

step 2. The wet rice is pounded with wooden mallets (kine) in a traditional mortar (usu). Two people will alternate the work, one pounding and the other turning and wetting the mochi. They must keep a steady rhythm or they may accidentally injure one another with the heavy kine. Below: me pounding mochi! That's the principle behind me!

step 3. The sticky mass is then formed into various shapes (usually a sphere or cube).
Well that was simple enough! Above are the hands of my teachers, grabbing globs of mochi, rolling it in simple soy bean powder, and then plopping it on plates. As you can see, homemade mochi is not as beautiful as mochi bought in the store. The dark red mash to the far left is sweetened adzuki bean paste, which is probably the top component to be found in a variety of Japanese sweets. We weren't nimble-fingered enough to encase the beans inside the mochi balls, but had no trouble getting them both in our mouths at the same time.

Lets have some more interesting mochi trivia from Wiki:

In Japanese folk tradition, rabbits living on the Moon produce mochi in the traditional method with mallets and mortars. (This legend identifies the markings of the moon as a rabbit pounding mochi).

After each new year, it is reported in the Japanese media how many people die from choking on mochi. The victims are usually elderly. Because it is so sticky it is difficult to dislodge via the Heimlich maneuver...some lifesaving experts say that a vacuum cleaner is actually efficient for [removing] stuck mochi.


Above, my supervisor Junko-sensei and her twin daughters pound away. Mochi making equals fun for the whole family!!!!

End of the Year Party

The absolute biggest occasion of the year for teachers in Japan is the End of the Year Party, occurring in late December just before the break between second and third semester begins. Community is important in Japan, as you know, and the work place is one of the most important in-groups to which people must conform. Therefore, you would have to be dead or dying to not show up at the End of the Year Party. And you would have to be very clever indeed to escape the social pressure to get utterly trashed and make a fool of yourself while at the party. Ginowan High is no exception to the rules. I had the good fortune of a good excuse for not drinking myself silly: a plane trip to Vietnam the next day. And from a sober perspective, the party was all the more entertaining. Above you see us all looking very stately (who knew what was in store?!) And below you can see bits of the glorious feast that was laid out for our dinner.
I had been asked earlier in the year if I was interested in participating in the dance performance at this party, but I had envisioned something like folk dance, or ball room dance, or I don't know what... so I had graciously turned them down. What a surprise it was, then, when several teachers disappeared in their suits and ties and returned to loud blaring pop music wearing these outfits:



WOAH! Super Mario, the Terminator, a drag queen, 3 santas, and... a man in pink plastic with socks stuffed in his drawers. I immediately regretted my decision not to be involved.Who knows what they would have dressed me as?

Now, actually I got ahead of myself. The Terminator was the first performance that was truly bizarre. The curtain rolled aside, and a large cardboard box began to inch itself across the stage. I furrowed my brow and risked a quick glance from side to side at my fellow viewers. Everyone was sipping away on wine, perfectly at ease in their official suits and fancy dresses as the creepy notes of the Terminator theme song began. And the Japanese version of Arnold Schwarzenegger (by this I mean that he is wearing fluorescent pink panties... Japanese people can't have any kind of festival without putting the men in drag) emerges. It's actually quite funny that this particular teacher performed this piece, because he is the Discipline Teacher. That's right, we have a teacher whose only job is to discipline bad kids. He shakes them in the teachers' room, yells at them in the courtyard, walks the corridors menacingly during class and enters any and everyone's room in order to bop a sleeping student upside the head, shoot dagger-eyes at paper-airplane throwers, or generally speaking scare the bejesus out of Wrong Doers. I myself was quite frightened of him before the party. Now I just have to call up the image of the fluorescent pink panties.

Here, you see a member of yet another dance performance. This is a kendo (sword fighting)/PE teacher dressed as one of Ginowan High's female students. Those white bunchy socks he's wearing went out of style on mainland Japan like 5 years ago, but unfortunately still seem to be in full-swing at my school.

After the performances, everyone started bustling around in a serious manner. I thought it might be time to go, but I was wrong... it was time for BINGO!!!!!

Wow, yeah. Apparently Japanese people, unlike Americans, love bingo (and Disneyland) at all ages. So a very competitive and rowdy game of drunken bingo followed. I won a calculator. I came in like 20th, but I blame this on the fact that I couldn't process the numbers being called out in Japanese fast enough to punch my holes.

After that, it was time to move on to the Second Party. The second and third or fourth parties are important concepts in Japanese, because many teacher or company official parties are followed up by another, and another, and another party... the crowd thinning out to hardcore drinkers as the night and locale progress. The Second Party was Karaoke. There are some very funny pictures of karaoke but I don't have them yet... check back to this article at the end of the week to see if I've gotten them!