Yes, finally, we had the mochi pounding event for the rest of the Tenmonkan area, on Sunday. The posters indicated there were going to be 6 participating locations, although I could only find 4 of them. One was supposed to be at Berg Plaza, in front of Lotteria, but there was a Red Cross blood drive going on there. I have no idea where the sixth place was. The first I found was in front of the Tenpara movie theater complex.
They had mochi flavored with kinoko powder (toasted soy powder) and soy sauce, or placed in red bean soup (called zenzai). The line here was only 3-5 people long when I arrived at 11 AM, and I got the bowl of zenzai pretty quickly.
Zenzai doesn't photograph well, but it tastes good. However, it was extremely hot, and took close to 5 minutes to eat.
Mochi, and the flavorings.
Pounding.
Over at Yamakaya, the guy doing the pounding insisted that I try my hand at it. I'd been trying to avoid this because I know I'll embarrass myself. Several other people there goaded me on and grabbed my backpack and camera, so I didn't have much choice.
You've got to be careful to not hit the stone bowl, because that will put splinters in the rice cake. Plus, that mallet really is heavy.
After four solid whacks, I was getting tired, and I was more than happy to hand the thing back to the guy. However, if I could be part of a team working on pounding mochi, I think this would be a decent way to get exercise.
The woman mostly hidden at the front of the line was handing out prewrapped pieces of mochi.
A couple of blocks over, other shopkeepers were handing out the zenzai to people that then stood in line for the mochi pieces, I didn't feel like standing in line that long, so I went over to Maruya Gardens to do a book search in Junkudo bookstore (I was trying to find cryptography books). Close to noon, I went back outside to KFC across the street.
The people here were only handing out zenzai.
They also had pickled daikon.
After getting my second bowl of zenzai, I went up to Amu Plaza. There wasn't anything interesting going on there, though, so I went back home and processed the photos for the blog. The rest of the day was spent studying Python. Overall, it was a quiet weekend.
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