Matthew's Mission and Masticating Mochi

Dear Family,

 We were very excited to learn of Matthew’s mission call to serve in the Japan Nagoya Mission. What a thrilling capstone this is to the great love that we have come to feel for the Japanese people – and, by the way, it also seems like a little hug from the Lord for us. It seems He hasn’t forgotten us and knows we are over here.  Go Matthew!!

The Kobersteins

 Last week President and Sister Gustafson were busy with district conferences and a mission tour by the area president, so we were drafted to host a newly arriving senior missionary couple and one departing after 18 months of service.   What a delightful and enlightening experience to share in the excitement, wonder and apprehension of the newly arriving couple followed swiftly by the confidence, joy and sense of accomplishment and a touch of sadness of the departing couple.  We were pleasantly astonished by the symmetry of the experience, since we have just reached the halfway point in our mission.   We wonder if we were that excited, that apprehensive when we came…and if we will be that confident, joyful and satisfied at the end.  We do know this, we have come to love enough to know that we will surely experience sadness when our mission here draws to a close.

We have now survived the complete “mochi” experience. Mochi is the traditional form of rice cake prepared and consumed on the Japanese New Year.  We had heard so much about it we wanted to experience it ourselves, and the Ogita family obliged, not on New Years Day, but on Foundation Day, February 11.   In traditional fashion, they precook polished, sticky rice, then enclose it in porous cloth bags and heat it in specially-prepared boxes over an open fire. When it reaches the right temperature, the rice is dumped into a stone bowl roughly 30 cm across (sorry, I don’t think in inches any more). There it is pounded into submission with large wooden mallets. The pounding is performed with two mallet wielders in a rapid rhythmic manner while after every two blows, a third participant reaches in quickly and turns the glutinous mass by hand. When the glob of smashed rice reaches the consistency of taffy, it is whisked into the house, dumped on a table covered with corn starch and the young women tear off pieces and form it by hand into the desired shape, usually a small hemisphere. Sometimes the mochi blob is formed to contain berries or sweet bean paste. Plain mochi may be eaten straight or with a dip made of soy sauce mixed with grated carrots and radishes.  We were also treated to mochi pizza and sweet mochi balls dipped in a kind of peanut powder and sprinkled with sugar.  It was surely an interesting experience, and we loved learning first hand this important Japanese tradition, but frankly, the product was not appealing as food. It’s tasteless and takes a lot of serious chewing to break down into digestible form. Maybe we were scared off by the statistic that each New Years, hundreds of Japanese, mostly the elderly, are rushed to the hospital, choking on mochi.

 Foundation Day, by the way, commemorates when the first emperor of Japan, Jimmu, allegedly assumed the throne in 660 BC or thereabouts, and was also the beginning of the lunar New Year. Coincidentally, it also was on February 11, 1946 that the US, as the occupying power, approved the current constitution of Japan. 

As always, we send our love and greeting across the miles, as your faithful far-eastern correspondents, Mom and Dad