After I got back to Kagoshima, on Jan. 1st, I scouted Tenmonkan for posters advertising mochi pounding events. While I did find the one poster for the taiko and champagne event for the 2nd, and another for the mochi pounding on Jan. 3rd at Gonza street in Tenmonkan, I wasn't able to locate anything for the other poundings that had been held the last couple of years.
I checked the blog entry for last year, and the main big day had been on the 2nd, when the Tenmonkan shopkeepers had poundings in front of Tenpara theater, Yamakataya, Lotteria, KFC, and one other street a block over from Yamakataya. The free food had included mochi with kinoko powder and soy sauce coatings, sweet red bean soup with mochi, and karukan (a local Kagoshima sweet snack). This year, I kept swinging by the old locations on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th, and finding nothing.
The shopkeepers on Gonza street, near Starbucks in Tenmonkan, did have their annual mochi making, though, with just the soy sauce coating, starting at noon, and including 3 separate poundings. I arrived a bit before noon, and there were about 75 people ahead of me. Fortunately, there was enough mochi for everyone. When I got mine, I walked around Tenmonkan to see if I could find anything else going on (I couldn't), and I came back here to get photos of the second pounding. There were a few other people standing around then, but absolutely no one in front of the distribution tables. I considered starting the new line and getting another piece of mochi, then decided against it because we have a LOT of mochi in the apartment we can grill.
In the "it's a small world" department, I ran into one student on the way to Tenmonkan, a second at Terukuni shrine, one guy I've met many times at the live music events at Gonza street, and Bon, lead singer of Bon DX, down at Yamakataya. It was a busy day, for a couple hours.
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