Pound with friends

It was a pretty typical Saturday, with running Number One around to cello doings, and Little One helping his papa call the Vaterland and do a (very) little housework. We had an invitation from a co-worker to come to a mochi-tsuki, so we headed over after orchestra, arriving at the Evil Empire just in time to see Darling Husband swinging the mallet. A hand-written poster outlined the process for those who weren’t familiar with it: Mochi-tsuki is a new year’s activity, where sweet rice is steamed and pounded "with friends" using mammoth wooden mallets (kine). The action centers around the massive granite mortar (usu): big burly young men, a trio of delicate women, little kids with papas shadowing, everyone takes part. It’s enormously entertaining, with the mochi master yelling instructions and spectators chanting as the pounders take turns, “ichi, ni, san, shi!” (“one, two, three, four!”). To change things up, the master will call on one person (invariably a broad-shouldered man) and they alternate in quick succession: the mallet smashes down with a satisfying splat, the master reaches in and moistens or turns the sticky mass with his hands while the mallet is on the upstroke, pulling them out just before it descends. Miraculously, no fingers are crushed, and the sticky white lump is eventually handed over to the women-folk, who form the mochi balls, much like we form dinner rolls, and distribute them to eager hands.

Historically, rice was a valuable commodity, and so it was that the community came together to pound the rice balls to insure a prosperous new year. It’s clearly too much of an undertaking for a single person. After a turn swinging the mallet, you need to catch your breath: if you had to pound it alone, it would get cold, and mochi is best eaten warm. So here they were, families wearing polar fleece and jeans, with card keys dangling from their lanyards, pounding and chanting and laughing, while little children ran around, dads snapped pictures and older kids helped out here and there. Number One had a go with the mallet, and said it would be fun even without the end product, but I disagree: the communal energy that went into the mochi made plain rice delicious.

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Back on the home front, Darling Husband scored the better part of a rather large cedar tree from some friends. This time it was cut into rounds (buy me a drink and I’ll tell you about the time he scored a whole tree), but it still needed to be split. We all took turns helping as we could, swinging the ax, pounding the wedges, carting and stacking wood. An oddly familiar gesture, perhaps firewood-tsuki? Yes it was fun, but as I stacked it, I was reminded of the adage that wood heats twice: once when you burn it, and once when you chop it. With friends.