Unique kashiwamochi in Hamamatsu

May 5 is a national holiday Children’s Day in Japan. It is also known as Tango-no-Sekku (端午の節句), a festival to pray for healthy growth and success for boys (for girls, we have the Doll Festival on March 3). Families with boys celebrate this day with warrior dolls displayed at home and carp streamers hung up outside. In recent years, however, it has been getting difficult to see carp streamers because of declining birth rate or for some other reasons.

May 5 is also my father’s birthday, so I visited my parents' house today.

I brought kashiwamochi or rice cakes stuffed with adzuki bean paste and wrapped with oak leaves. They are traditionally eaten on Tango-no-Sekku. One of them was a special one,

which was three times as big as the other (ordinary size).

Instead of a birthday cake, we cut it into three pieces.

I got the right one. The rice cake was fresh, soft, elastic, and delicious.

My father got the middle piece with much adzuki bean paste in it. After eating it up, he asked me if he could have the other kashiwamochi. I was glad that he had a good appetite (we had already lunch before this). The normal-sized kashiwamochi was brown because it was made from sorghum. I heard this type of kashiwamochi is unique to this area and it is softer than ordinary white kashiwamochi.

In addition to kashiwamochi, we had tsurunokomochi, pink and white rice cakes eaten in festive occasions. They have the shape of an egg of a crane that is a symbol of longevity and said to live for a thousand years. My mother and I ate one tsurunokomochi respectively. It was soft and had mild sweetness.

I thought these rice cakes were very good. They were all from a rice cake shop Tsuchiya Mochiten (つちや餅店), not a confectionery store. I remember a Japanese proverb saying “For rice cakes, go to the rice cake shop (餅は餅屋)”. It means one should go to specialists for the best results. As for Japanese traditional sweets based on rice cakes, rice cake shops can excel confectionery stores sometimes.

Rice cakes are given or eaten in a variety of festive occasions. In Hamamatsu, extremely big kashiwamochi are often used as a return gift for a gift to celebrate the birth of a child (when a boy is born, it is often his grandparents who buy warrior dolls and carp streamers for him). In addition, they are also used as a treat in Hamamatsu Festival where big kites are flown to celebrate the birth of children. It is usually held from May 3 to 5 but was cancelled this year to avoid the crowd like this.

The rice cake shop Tsuchiya Mochiten provides three sizes of “big kashiwamochi”, and I bought the smallest one to be eaten by three people. The biggest one is ten times as big as an ordinary kashiwamochi, which may be the one intended for the festival.

In addition to kashiwamochi, Tsuchiya Mochiten has dumplings, warabimochi, and some other traditional sweets. If you live in Hamamatsu and seek real vegan treats, I highly recommend visiting there. From the bus station, take bus #40, #41, etc., get off at Izumicho-Naka (泉町中), and walk southward for a few minutes. You can find the shop easily. Though it was open today, it is usually closed on Tuesday.

When I went there this morning, I saw drawings on the ground to help customers in a queue to keep a social distance. The shop is small, so customers have to wait outside sometimes. The drawings represented skewered dumplings, grilled rice cake, and rice cake pounding, and people should stand on them. In addition to this, they seemed to take several measures against COVID-19, leaving me a good impression.