I'll write about the village festival continued from the last entry.
Have you ever seen Japanese-style mochi pounding? I'll show you a Google Image site linking to lots of images of mochi pounding. When celebrating something in Japan, people like neighbors, relatives or companies often get together and cooperate on rice-cake making. I'm going to tell you how to make rice-cake, but it's not easy to translate items into English. I hope that the pictures from Google will help you understand what I want to say.
Now, at first, you steam the sticky rice and put it into a rice mortar, and pound it with one, sometimes several, big and heavy pestle. As I couldn't find suitable words, I expressed special items for mochi-pounding as "mortar and pestle". If you know more suitable words, tell me please. I think that you'd know what I was talking about.
Anyway, repeating the action of Lifting a pestle in the air and banging it down on the mortar requires physical power and is hard work. Women usually don't pound rice cakes with a big pestle, but I found a smart pounding machine that is shown in the picture. An aged woman was pounding a mass of sticky rice with a man supplying a small amount of water that prevented the rice from caking to the mortar and pestle. I was watching the movement for a while. She didn't need to aim at the mortar. The machine was set just in a good position. She was only stepping the bar down regularly. It was very simple and easy. I was impressed with the idea.
(Vocabulary)
mochi pounding / rice-cake making 餅つき
mortar and pestle 臼と杵
glutinous [sweet] rice / sticky rice 餅米
steam（ご飯などを）蒸す
sweat（野菜などを）蒸す
bang down〔斧や棒など〕振り下ろす
cake [自] 固まる, こびりつく
be caked with/in sth ＜…＞がこびりついている
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