Food and the Heart

6

Such vague comments make it difficult to talk about rice cakes in a leisurely manner, but it was good for spring to do something typical of spring, and to expose our curiously ignorant suspicions and hope for magnificent future outcomes through cooperative comparison. If we reflect on the present beliefs of the gods Ubusuna and Ujigami, we will understand at least one part of the aphorism that forms the basis of the agricultural country, where Japanese people seem to have a long-standing habit and fate of valuing their homes. Shrines were once inseparable from the belief in ancestral spirits through their rank and the size of their buildings. Even after the transition, people began to worship another and greater god, there are still many cases in which the god of their ancestors is interposed between the main god and the inhabitants. It seems that there was no evil and happiness without the involvement of ancestral spirits. For this reason, the custom of saying requiem began in the Middle Ages, and the method of funeral has changed. At least 50 or 100 years ago, Buddhist people took charge of the souls of ancestors and their descendants served the afterlife in two ways. Bon and New Year's became two very different festivals. Thus, the shrines in the villages are far from these two, and they are supposed to instruct people with a third force, such as kanno (faith leads to gods) and kizui (omens of happiness). This is probably a fact that can be proved by the methods of conventional historiography, but I wanted to know whether, according to this superficial logic, every region is equally subject to the separate rule of the three spirits, and whether some of the lands still readily admit some traditional ideas. This is not, of course, the problem of the few awake or lost. It is the knowledge which we seek, and which is necessary for this study, that acts in the mind of the most ordinary and common inhabitants as a force to be connected with their birthplace.

aphorism（名）格言

inseparable（形）切り離せない

inhabitant（名）住民

involvement（名）関与

afterlife（名）あの世

omen（名）前兆

superficial（形）表面的な

admit（動）認める

If I pay little attention, I can get a lot of materials from local people, but I am an outsider, so it is hard to get a chance. So, I set the simplest goal as a means. It was relatively unchanged in the so-called tangible culture, that is, it was a food made only during ceremonies. The time of pounding rice cakes is still fixed in each region. The shape and name of the rice cake are fixed depending on the day, and it is not even allowed to make a mistake, people who hear the sound of a beetle pounding rice cake at an unexpected time cannot believe their ears, so they expect the day and the day when it is needed. The relationship between New Year's Day and rice cake need not be described in detail, but there are many other cases in which kagami-mochi of the same shape is offered on the festival day of a shrine in a village, and there are many cases in which rice cake is not only made during the topping-out ceremony when a house is newly built but also pounded as a celebration of marriage or birth. Therefore, rice cake is considered to be auspicious, but even by comparing the above examples, it is difficult to give a common motive for making rice cake and rice cake is also needed when a terrible event occurs, such as Shijuku mochi (rice cake made 49 days after the death of a person) and Mimifusagi mochi (rice cake made to cover the ears when hearing the news of the death of the same age). Okinawa is our brother who diverged early, but this place is so extreme that they don't make rice cakes on auspicious occasions or New Year's Day. During seasonal ancestral festivals such as December 8, foods called muchi* are made. Therefore, if we think about rice cakes all over Japan, the question of when to pound them and for what purpose is not obvious and not foolish. At the same time, if it is possible to compare their differences with each other, even in a detailed table of their uses, names, and various taboos and conditions (especially their shapes and methods of distribution), it is necessary to let the people who are directly involved in this custom tell the reason. It was strange that books compiled by social projects and encyclopedias collected old records of life in Kyoto and Edo and described them as a custom of Japan as a whole, but it was even more ridiculous that many local geographies accepted the contents uncritically and tried to correct the traditional legends of their places, wondering when they could have gone wrong. Isolated local studies often downplayed their materials and even encouraged their destruction.

outsider（名）部外者

relatively（副）比較的

tangible（形）有形の

fix（動）決める

beetle（名）杵

topping-out ceremony......上棟式

auspicious（形）縁起の良い

diverge（動）枝分かれする、分岐する

downplay（動）軽視する

*muchi: A rice cake eaten in Okinawa on December 8 of the old lunar calendar for good health and longevity.