Hanabira Mochi

 

I went to the store yesterday to get some Hanabira Mochi and take a picture but the store was closed. So, this is just a random picture I stole off the internet.

 

In Japan, there is a tradition to eat a sweet called Hanabira Mochi at the opening of the New Year, especially to serve it as a tea sweet for the First Tea Ceremony of the year. This sweet consists of bean/miso paste and candied burdock root sandwiched within a circle of pink-coloured rice cake. I really love this type of sweet, but apparently there are people don’t find candied burdock that appetizing. Recently, my friend who is an expert in Japanese history and traditions wrote a FB post about the origins of this sweet, so I thought I would summarize it here in English.

Hanabira mochi has its origins in a custom from the early Heian period (794-901AD) called Hagatame (歯固). As you might know, Japan has long placed special emphasis on the “firsts” of the year, and Hagatame was the “first” eating of something hard. By ceremonially eating some sort of firm food, it was thought that one’s teeth and general health would be strengthened for the coming year. This custom is mentioned in many old works of Japanese literature such as the Tosa Diary, the Pillow Book,the Seikyuu-ki, and even the Engi-shiki. For this custom, firm foods such as white radish, squash, venison, or boar were marinated in miso or salt and enjoyed as a feast. By the way, this feast is also the origin of what is now called “Osechi Ryouri” and is eaten all over Japan on the New Year.

However, as time continued, this custom was simplified. In the Edo period (1603-1868), many of the marinated foods previously eaten as Hagatame were reduced to fillings sandwiched between rice cakes. One of these miso marinated foods was of course burdock root, but at this point these foods were usually eaten along with sake, not tea.

In the Meiji period (1868-1912), the 11th Head of the Urasenke House (Gengensai) had to honor of giving the first Tea of the year in the Imperial Palace. At this Tea, he choose to serve Hanabira Mochi in the form we know it today as the sweet. Thus from that time on, not only Urasenke-style tea practitioners, but many tea schools serve Hanabira Mochi as the sweet at the first Tea of the year.

At the end of essay, I thought it was charming how my friend remarked what a delightful age we live in that even very inexpensive sweets shops all over the country sell hanabira mochi at the new year for anybody to be able to enjoy. What a pleasant age indeed.

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A Cup of Tea 13: Manyou no Hana

My friend gave me this sweet she received as present because she knows how much I like Japanese sweets. It is a type of rakugan (pressed sugar) sweet from the shop Moroe-ya (諸江屋) that was founded in 1849. It had a dry adzuki anko in the center and was made with both wasabon sugar and kanbai-ko flour. This rakugan is called Man’you no Hana (万葉の花, Flowers of Ten Thousand Leaves). The term “man’you” in particular is famous from the title of an ancient anthology of poems, the Man’you-shuu. I really adore this style of elegantly plain, classic sweets.

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Miso Pan Museum 6: Nisshin-dou Seika

Miso pan is a sweet, dense, country-style dessert bread made with wheat flour and miso and known for it’s honest country flavour. Because Hokkaido grows a lot of wheat and soybeans (miso), it is a popular treat here.

Nisshin-dou Seika is actually a company from Nagano Prefecture, not from Hokkaido. But you can buy their misopan at large supermarkets. The package has a very cute wood print of cat eating misopan on it and recommends warming up the misopan in the toaster before eating it. I don’t own a toaster, or a microwave, or an oven, so I haven’t tried this. Nisshin-dou’s miso pan is on the dryer side, with a sort of almost crisp sugar coating on top. This sweetness is contrasted by the saltiness of the miso and shoyu in it, a little bit like mitarashi dango. The loaves are small and come individually wrapped in plastic. A bit wasteful, but convenient for carrying about in the purse or pocket.

Ingredients: Wheat flour, sugar, egg, sugar syrup, rice syrup (mizuame), glucose, yeast flavouring, malt extract, vegetable protein, miso, salt, shoyu, leavening, chlorella alga extract

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My Kimono Life 27: Tea in English

This kimono is yellow with a vine like pattern of leaves and orange flowers that for some reason always reminds me of a maile lei. Today, I paired it with an earthy green tsumugi obi with a design of distant hills in orange and red. My obiage was orange chirimen silk, while my obijime was a round one in light yellow. With it, I wore my new navy blue and white striped socks which I had bought on sale the other day.

My new socks!

I wore this kimono to a sort of farewell tea party for my tea teacher. She is following her husband for a year to America, as his job takes him there. My teacher also teaches English casually to some of the neighborhood elementary school children, so she asked me to be the “host” and hoped the children could experience how tea ceremony can be an internationalizing activity. It was really quite sweet.

Because of this, I was a bit torn about what language to speak. The children and their mothers do not speak that much English but since this is a sort of English experience I thought it might be better to speak in (simple) English. Also, I am fluent in Japanese, but it is not my native language so I cannot speak Japanese with the ease and subtle archaic beauty with which I can instill my English. It was a bit difficult of a decision.

Actually, I often feel conflicted about this. English is an “international language” and it is the language of the dominant powers in the world. English has this status and with also matches my (Caucasian) face. Given this and the fact I have a command of English as my native language* that I may never possess of Japanese, insisting on English gives me a distinct advantage. On the other hand, Japanese itself can be very beautiful and when involved in Japanese culture, there are many instances when only Japanese is suitable for the situation. When thinking about this, I feel very keenly the conflict men like Nitobe Inazo and Basil Chamberlain must have felt.

*Caveat: Although English is my native language, that doesn’t mean I don’t speak it without an “accent”. Accents are relative but mine is neither American nor British nor any other nation’s accent. Furthermore, my grammar is an unusual mix of the language I grew up hearing and that I have read in old books. That said, English is indeed my native language and I am inclined to think my way of speaking is rather superior to the various national types of English. After all, I’ve taken in all of the good parts of English and retained only a minimum of the bad!

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A Cup of Tea 11: Poetry

A cup of Asagiri (“morning mist”) green tea from Chiran with rice crackers from Buson-an of Kyoto.

Each packet the rice crackers are wrapped in have a poem written on the front. The package of these crackers said:

青海の　風も畳の　かほりかな
The blue sea breeze, too, has the scent of tatami mats

Many people in the West don’t know the scent of the tatami, nor do they generally appreciate that pure ocean scent, so I don’t know if they can appreciate the image this poem evokes. But these crackers are flavored with ao-nori, which has the most delightful ocean scent, so I thought it was appropriate. Here are a couple more poems from different packages.

水仙に　狐あそぶや　宵月夜
Foxes playing in daffodils in the early Spring moonlight

雨の日や　都に遠き　もゝのやど
On a rainy day far from the Capital taking shelter under a peach tree

The full essence of the poem is a little hard to capture in English. For example, “daffodils” is written the characters meaning “water” and “wise hermit”, while “foxes” have a particular image of supernatural mischievousness that they lack in Western culture. Furthermore, “peaches” have been known since ancient times for their purifying power in Japanese culture, while being “far from the Capital” evokes a loneliness unparalleled in the image evoked by the mere English translation. But I hope you can enjoy my translations all the same.

Finally, I wanted to show off this antique cup. It is a prewar piece, possibly made for export, made of a very thin and delicate porcelain. Modern tea cups rarely have wall as thin as antique pieces which makes them sturdier, but so much less nice to drink from. Held up to the light, the image of a geisha appears like magic in the bottom. The skill of artisans of Old Japan is so delightful!

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A Cup of Tea 10: American Style

America is not generally known for its tea drinking habits. Was it at the Boston Tea Party that things went wrong? But I felt my tea today was in a modern American style. The tea itself was Whittard’s Breakfast, but along with it I had some crackers, a chocolate truffle (Hotel Chocolate! But actually a British company), and that classic American touch: a vanilla scented candle, given to me by my grandmother.

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A Cup of Tea 9: Breakfast

Here I am having the delightful English Breakfast tea from Whittard sent to me by my dear brother along with steamed castella cakes and fig jam.

The cakes, by the way, I make myself. They are made with nothing but egg, flour, and a bit of sugar (wasantou) that is beaten together and steamed.

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My Kimono Life 17: Summer Shawl

This picture is from August, so I am wearing a black silk ro kimono with a cream coloured obi made from hemp. This picture is at my friend’s house, where we had some tea together. The weather was very fine that day and I wasn’t inclined towards wearing a coat, so instead a threw on this summer weight shawl. There is often the idea that Japanese clothing and Western clothing can’t be mixed, but this is completely untrue and in fact was very common in the medieval and modern periods. It only once kimono stopped being everyday wear that people began to think you can’t mix the two fashions. Which is a shame.

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A Cup of Tea 8: Homemade Sweets

Here is a konashi sweet I made at home. The colouring is rather subdued, so I think it is good for Autumn. It is surprisingly simple to make, only using red and white beans, along with sugar plus wheat and rice flour. Along with it I had matcha. The bowl’s design, by the way, is called An Nam (安南), because it was traditionally found on bowls imported from North Viet Nam.

Recipe: Konashi Sweet

Ingredients

• Shiro-an (White bean paste)
• Koshi-an (Smooth red bean paste)
• Wheat Flour
• Mochiko (Rice flour)
• White sugar

Instructions

1. Heat up the Shiro-an in a frying pan until some of the moisture dissipates and it becomes a little crumbly.
2. In a bowl, mix it with a little wheat flour and then mochiko until it becomes a slightly crumbly dough.
3. Squeeze it into fist-size lumps and steam it for about half an hour.
4. Then knead the steamed lumps together with a little bit of sugar into a single ball. This is called konashi-tane.
5. Do the same thing for the koshi-an.
6. Let the konashi tane sit overnight.
7. The next day, re-steam the konashi tane for about 5 minutes. Knead it with
8. Make small balls of koshian. Also make small balls of each of the konashi-tane.
9. Put two ball of the konashi tane together and press it into a flat circle, with one side red and one side white.
10. Wrap the koshian ball in this konashi-tane circle.
11. Place the whole sweet in a thin damp cloth and twist it, pressing the twisted part of the cloth down to make a depression in the center.
12. Open it up and you are done!

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My Kimono Life 19: So Fell Autumn Rain

This photograph is from September, but I left for my friend’s house for tea a bit before noon. The sky was cloudy, but I didn’t fear and just set out for the subway station without an umbrella. Thus arriving at my friend’s house, we enjoyed a lovely afternoon. We first we had a sort of memorial thin tea, which we followed with a goma-tofu sweet from Mt. Koya. Then we enjoyed two types of thick tea together. After this, we decided to enjoy some incense. First we tried byakudan (sandalwood) followed by some jinkoh (aloeswood). During our afternoon, a rain began to fall which created a pleasant Autumn atmosphere.

Incense!

When the time came for me to go, my friend was so kind to take me subway station, but it was still raining when I got off the train near my house. Not wanting to get the hem of my kimono dirty, and clutched it up around my knees and walked  the 15 minutes home in the rain. My michiyuki coat got rather spattered, but the kimono underneath was preserved from road dirt.

Anyway, I wore a chirimen silk, unlined kimono with a design of chrysanthemums, maples, plum, cherry blossoms, and flower carts all done in Autumnal orange, red, blue, and green. With it was a black shusa silk obi, with a brocaded design of a golden fan with chrysanthemums laid on top. An orange obiage and green obijime finished the ensemble. Over all, I thought it was rather Autumn-like combination.

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