KAHULUI -- At the Fujita home in Kahului, some hands were swinging wooden mallets. Other skilled hands were white with potato starch as 100 people gathered Saturday to continue the Japanese tradition of pounding mochi for the new year.
"It's our once-a-year thing that we do. Just to keep the tradition going," said Tom Fujita, who opened his home to family, friends, neighbors and a few welcome visitors.
While mochi rice cake is eaten year-round, it is a traditional New Year's food for the Japanese.
Mochi is made from a polished glutinous white rice that is mashed with wooden mallets until it is gooey dough. Chunks are hand-rolled with potato starch into a flattened ball that can be prepared in several ways.
Commercially, mochi is made by machines. In keeping with tradition, families opt to prepare the rice cakes the old way during New Year's to bring good luck.
"My family never did this," said Mindy Oumi, a former Oahu girl who now lives in Los Angeles. "It's really cool."
Oumi is a relative of the Fujitas, who only got her first taste of mochitsuki, or rice cake making, last year.
On Oahu, she said, traditions get lost in the big city, but tend to stay alive in smaller communities such as Maui.
Oumi said her friends in Los Angeles, who are from Japan, were surprised that families still pound mochi, which is something that is done only in rural areas of Japan.
She said she was going to take the Maui-made mochi to Oahu for her mother, who will use it in ozoni soup. The soup is another New Year's specialty, containing balls of mochi, and vegetables such as carrots, honeywort (mitsuba) and kamaboko or fish cake.
Fujita said the mochi-making process can be lengthy, with preparations spanning several days.
Done the old way, families soak their rice for about three days to ensure it will be soft. The rice is steamed for about 45 minutes. To set up the steamers, mochi makers are at the home at 4 a.m.
In the Fujitas' backyard, two round metal cylinders serve as steamers, with gas burners providing the heat. Up until three years ago, Fujita and his crew used kiawe wood instead.
He joked about how busy a wood-burning stove kept the crew that was manning the steamers as they had to continuously plug wood into the burners to keep the flames hot. With gas, they can talk story and have a beer.
Stacked on the steamer pans are four square wooden boxes with rice.
After the rice is steamed, the Fujitas take a break from tradition, putting the cooked rice into a hamburger grinder. It makes the pounding process easier, Fujita said.
Forcing the grains through the grinder with footlong wooden mallets, the crew pulls out the mash like a sausage that's long and very sticky.
Then it's back to tradition, with the mash placed into a stone mortar, or usu, a heavy stand with a bowl carved into it.
Men take turns with the kines, or wooden mallets, used to pound the rice until it is absolutely smooth and blended, while one of the crew reaches in between blows to fold and roll the dough.
Fujita said one of the usu is his, while another is his neighbor's. He said his usu was passed down to him from his parents and estimated that both of the stone mortars could be nearly 100 years old.
There is a skill to pounding mochi. The men wielding the kine must keep time so they don't hit hit one another or the person who is constantly wetting and turning the mochi to keep it soft and from sticking to the usu.
They also need to be on target. Hitting the mallet on the side of the usu can result in splinters mashed into the mochi dough.
A relative from Oahu, Bill Axt, who is of Austrian and Hungarian descent, looked like an old pro as he was working up a sweat pounding the mochi. He's had plenty of practice.
This was his 14th year participating in the Fujita family exercise.
"I think it's important. It carries on the tradition," he said, noting his two children are half Japanese.
Clifton Akiyama, a Lahainaluna classmate of Tom Fujita, was a supervisor for the pounders, and the worker risking his hands and fingers, wetting and turning the hot mash that he said is piping hot at at least 140 degrees.
"We need to maintain that temperature so it can be mashed," he said.
From the usu, the hot glutinous mixture goes to the shaping table, where women "cut" the mochi into balls, then shape it, using potato starch to keep their hands from sticking to the mochi.
Caren Tateishi of Kahului was one of the practiced "cutters." Using her thumb and index finger, she squeezed a ball, then worked the hot sticky blob. The mixture needs to be hot so she can shape it properly. Otherwise it gets too rubbery, she said.
One by one, Tateishi cut the white blob into smaller pieces - potato starch covered her ring as she worked the rice.
Once the massive mound of mochi is cut into smaller pieces, the women at the work tables roll the balls into the typical domelike shape. Some mochi are filled with sweet red beans or sweet red bean paste known in Hawaii as azuki. The Fujitas also use a peanut butter filling.
But pieces also are kept unfilled to be used as kagami mochi, which are placed on shrines set up in a home as an offering. Having mochi in the home is believed to assure good fortune in the new year. Kagami mochi are usually two-tiered with a smaller sized mochi on top.
Generations show up at Fujita's annual event, which began in 1985 with a group of Fujita's classmates. It blossomed into a massive neighborhood event that Fujita has been hosting since 1990. Masae Murakami, in her 80s, remembers when she used to pound mochi at her grandparents' home in the plantation camps in Lahaina.
"We never had tents," she said laughing at the tarp Fujita put over the usus to shade the mochi pounders.
"To me it's good to keep up the tradition for the young people. There are so many young ones here today," she said.
One of those was Kara Higa, 19. But she shared the workload at the shaping table with those several decades older then her.
"I think it's fun," she said. "It's nice to learn our Japanese traditions."
Melissa Tanji can be reached at mtanji@mauinews.com.
