Food and the Heart

6

Except for the notable custom in the Sanin region, the New Year in early modern times was the season when people had the least need for power, so it is not surprising that the significance of eating rice cakes with these names was gradually forgotten. Moreover, they could not completely ignore that rice cakes had the valuable energy provided by rice cakes. I can list several examples of chikara-mochi that probably began after that. One of them, which is quite widely known, is the practice of feeding rice cakes to women who have been weakened by childbirth. In Uchikaifu on Sado Island, chikara-mochi is the name of a rice cake that mothers eat on the day when they put away their futon after giving birth, which is considered to have been dried (reported by Ichiro Kurata), so it may have been a preserved rice cake made during the New Year. However, in many other regions, people pound rice cakes after childbirth, and the period of making them is slightly different from that in there. For example, in the vicinity of Bofu, Suo Province, a rice cake that a woman received from her parents' home when she was in her ninth month of pregnancy is called chikara-mochi (Yamaguchi Ken San'iku Shuzoku Chosa), and in Asakuchi County, Bicchu Province, miso soup with dumplings for women to eat after childbirth is called chikamachi, which seems to have a dialect of chikara-mochi. This term comes from the word meaning something that is already waiting. Giving rice cakes or dumplings to a parturient woman to strengthen her seems to be an old custom, and there are examples in various places. Tayori-dango made in the Kokura region of Kyushu is also dumplings in miso soup, and it was believed that feeding them to a woman right after giving birth would aid her digestion (Buzen Vol.2 No. 2). In each county in Shiga Prefecture, the parents of a parturient bring rice cakes to her and make her eat them by the next day or by the seventh night after delivery. They are called harawata-mochi, which translates to 'rice cake of organs' because they are believed to aid a woman's digestion, and many people in Ika County in the north call it chikara-mochi. Also in the Koromo region of Mikawa Province, on the seventh night after a woman gave birth, two large pieces of rice cake marked with red dots were wrapped in paper and presented. Part of these rice cakes is also eaten by the parturient woman. This is called harabata-mochi. In Tokyo, this is called doyo no harawata-mochi (rice cake of the midsummer season), and the custom of eating rice cakes in the hottest summer season is not limited to being eaten by parturient women. This naming is very easy to understand, but since people eat rice cakes to alleviate a feeling of weakness in their stomachs, which is interpreted as a lack of intestines, the naming is appropriate and natural to the sense of the eater.

significance（名）意義

slightly（副）わずかに

vicinity（名）付近

pregnancy（名）妊娠

parturient（形）出産が迫った

digestion（名）消化

delivery（名）出産

interpret（動）解釈する

intestines（名）腸