Mochi Tsuki (Mochi-pounding festival)

First day of school in the New Year. We start the year with a mochi-pounding festival because the Japanese believe that eating mochi (similar to our muah chi) will bring you luck for the rest of the year.

Many parents came to school early to help with the preparations for Mochi Tsuki. The Home Economics cooking room was filled with parents (mostly female, but a no. of males too) grating daikon (radish), cooking anko (sweet red bean), preparing the glutinous rice for the mochi-pounding, etc. This is a photo of one counter...there are about 8-10 counters in the cooking room (blurred photo cos camera lens fogged up)

Some parents voluntarily helping to clear the school driveway

See how high the snow build-up is (and it's only early Jan! Japan's snowiest months are Feb followed by Jan)

Tools for pounding mochi

First, pour some hot water into the mortar. Then, put some cooked glutinous rice in the mortar and begin mashing it (just push it around) with the pestle.

When the rice is more mashed-up (i.e. each grain is not so whole), you can begin pounding

Elenore and I had a go. We did much better than the frail Japanese girls despite our body aches from 2 consecutive days of snowboarding. The difficult part is lifting the pestle up quickly enough cos the rice/mochi sticks to it and the pestle is heavy.

The school hall filled with students pounding mochi

Lunch was...mochi, of course! 3 flavours (in order of my preference): Kinako (soybean powder), anko (red bean) and daikon (yucks...salty!).

That night, we had an enkai and some parents joined us too. The food was good - crab legs, grilled salmon, fried prawns, sashimi, inari, nabe, etc. The mood was great too. A few mothers actually held hands and swung their arms while singing the school song towards the end of the enkai and everyone in the room started doing the same.

Japanese parents are really involved in the school. They actually know the lyrics of the school song (it is quite long). I also met the lady who gave me a whole bag of clothes, 2 teddy bears and a Hello Kitty photo frame at the Shiozawa fair in Oct 2005. She actually bothered driving down from Nagaoka (at least 1 hour by car) to help out at this event.