Mochi Party Feeds Need for Tradition

Holding fistfuls of congealed hot rice, Jimmy Otsuka dashed from a bay of rice steamers over to the concrete bowl and slammed down a sticky glob for the girls to mash.

“We want some rice!” yelled 9-year-old Rukka Suzuki of Fountain Valley as she and her friends huddled around an empty concrete bowl--called an usa--all clutching hand-carved wooden mallets.

Hundreds gathered Sunday at Otsuka’s five-acre strawberry farm in Santa Ana to make mochi rice cakes--sticky balls of crushed rice--to continue a centuries-old Japanese New Year ritual.

“I remember being a kid and just loving this,” said Otsuka, 46, who has vowed to keep the tradition of making mochi alive for the younger generation.

For Sunday’s mochi assembly line, more than 100 pounds of rice were soaked in plastic-lined trash cans overnight. The rice is steamed over a fire, kneaded, then pounded into a paste.

“We’re trying to resurrect an old custom,” said Glenn Tanaka, president of the Orange Coast Optimist Club, sponsor of the event. “It’s supposed to be good luck, to start the New Year off right.”

Small bits are pinched off from the final product--a doughy glob-- and then shaped into round cakes on a cornstarch-lined wood tray. Using a dip of soy sauce and sugar or peanut butter, the cakes are eaten right away or frozen to eat on New Year’s Day.

“Ugh! My stick’s stuck,” said Rukka, her mallet embedded in the mound of rice. She took another whack at the rice and grimaced when a dab of the mochi flew off and hit her straight in the mouth.

“It’s an acquired taste,” said Arleen Kubo of Fountain Valley about the wads of odorless paste.

The celebration had some modern flourishes: Two automated mochi makers whirred away on a table at the margins, kneading rice into perfect balls. But the machines are used only when the kids are too tuckered out to pound any more paste.

“My arms feel like jello,” said Ryan Ito, 13, beads of sweat on his face after giving the rice globs a good pounding.

“A lot of these young people don’t know how to do it,” said Stella Otsuka, Jimmy Otsuka’s mom. “If you pound it too much, it gets soft. If you add too much water, it gets gooey.”

The process wasn’t letter-perfect and some of the cakes were tastier than others, but Jimmy Otsuka said that he’s glad they’re at least trying to preserve the tradition.

“When you see it in the store now, you know the work that went into it,” said Nicole Inouye, 23, of Huntington Beach, the current Miss Orange County Japanese American.

The younger kids appeared to heap sugar and peanut butter on their mochi, but a few tossed them half-eaten into the trash. The older generation is hoping they don’t throw away the custom.

“They taste better when you make them by hand,” Stella Otsuka said. “You had to work for it.”