Mochi-Mochi Poem by gershon hepner

Rice clumps that aren’t mochi-mochis,
sticky as the clumps of goat-cheese,
do not cause the gentlemen
of Japan to turn to Zen,
for particles, called pasa-pasas,
turn men who do not curse to cussers,
while those who serve it with their sushi
fall flat on faces or their tushy,
remaining incommunicado
while fearing chefs more than Mikado.

People sometimes clump like rice,
which many would consider nice,
for those who unlike rice won’t clump
are often asked to take a jump,
and pasa-pasa people are
less popular than steak tartare,
or Bush in Baghdad’s main bazaar,
to think of something more bizarre.
Here’s what rice and men embitters:
being lonely, lonesome critters.

Martin Fackler writes in the WSJ on October 29,2003, that most prized attribute is a damp stickiness, called mochi-mochi in Japanese. 'Words can't express the pleasure when you bite into good rice, ' says Koichiro Takahashi, the 12th-generation owner of the oldest rice shop in Fukushima, founded in 1751. He says he can tell whether a rice is good by the pleasurable chewy texture in the mouth. 'It is a joy only a Japanese can understand.'
The Koriyama case (when a suspicious shopper complained that her rice looked funny. Last month authorities arrested wholesaler Hideaki Mashiko. Over 10 years he had sold supermarkets here more than 50 tons of white rice supposedly grown near this city in Japan's mountainous northeastern rice belt. Labels represented it as 100% top-grade, locally grown rice. But he confessed he had adulterated the high-grade rice by mixing in cheaper, lower-quality kernels) drew national attention because it was the only blending incident involving foreign rice. The ruse was discovered when a housewife in Fukushima city called a local supermarket to complain that rice she had bought contained grains that were longer than usual. The consistency of the rice was pasa-pasa. That is, it was dry and didn't stick together, the opposite of mochi-mochi.
A DNA test identified the culprit kernels as indica rice, a type eaten in India and southeast Asia that looks very different from the shorter and chewier japonica varieties favored locally. Regulators discovered the rice was imported from the U.S. after seizing the company's books. Japonica rice is also grown in the U.S., much of it in California.


10/29/03