Japanese American family keeps up mochi making tradition

In Little Tokyo, owners of century-old Japanese sweet shops say they don't sell mochi nearly as much as they used to. Frances Hashimoto of Mikawaya said her New Year's output has dropped to 3,000 pounds of rice from 6,000 pounds in the last few years. At Fugetsudo on 1st Street, owner Brian Kito said he expects to sell 10,000 pounds this year, down from his peak production of 16,000 pounds in the 1960s.

Community organizations, too, have noted a decline. The Orange County Buddhist Church, for instance, has decreased its output to 1,000 pounds this year from 1,800 pounds in the late 1960s.

Some blame low-carb diets for the decline, saying that fewer people want to stuff themselves with gobs of sticky white rice. Others say cultural assimilation is the reason, as successive generations stray from the traditions of ancestral Japan. The community bonds that kept mochi-making as much a social opportunity as a gastronomic one may have weakened as Japanese Americans have scattered to the suburbs.

"We're seeing declining levels of mochi consumption, and it has to do with cultural assimilation and not maintaining traditions," said Steve Matsubara, president of the Southeast Los Angeles North Orange County chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, which has halved its production in the last decade.

But in the Akiyoshi home, the traditions remain strong.

Tammie Akiyoshi's father, Ken Katayama, can recall mochi-making that dates back to 1930s Japan, where he spent five years as a young student. Back then, he said, families would pound the steamed rice in hollowed-out tree trunks with wooden mallets, then cut and shape the rice cakes by hand.

Nearly eight decades later, technology has changed the rituals and made it easier for individual families to make their own mochi. The Akiyoshi family uses multilevel aluminum steamers, an electronic pounding machine and a contraption equipped with a hand crank to push out the steaming dough and a blade to cut it into small pieces.

The pounding machine was purchased more than two decades ago by Cary Akiyoshi, a Monterey Park contractor who missed the mochi that his uncle sent every year until the latter shut down his Japanese pastry shop. After visiting a friend whose family made its own mochi, Akiyoshi decided to invest what seemed at the time an outrageous sum on the equipment -- nearly $500 for the pounding machine and, later, an additional $1,000 for two multilevel steamers.