A coloring page of kagami mochi, the offering that stands in Japanese homes from the end of December until the second week of January: two round rice cakes stacked large under small, a daidai (a bitter orange) with its leaf on top, and a wooden stand dressed in folded red-and-white paper. Almost all of it is white in life, so this is a page where the person colouring decides how much colour it gets. Useful for care-home activity sessions and at home alike. Free to download and print as a PDF, no registration needed.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
Did your household set out a kagami mochi at New Year? Where in the house did it go?
At kagami-biraki, how was the mochi eaten?
Sweet red-bean soup, ozoni broth, or isobeyaki — grilled and wrapped in nori — which way do you prefer?
Supermarkets now sell kagami mochi as a moulded plastic shell with small wrapped cakes inside. What do people make of that change?
Why is it called a “mirror” rice cake?
The usual explanation is the shape: a flat round cake resembles the bronze mirrors of ancient Japan, and a mirror was treated as a sacred object in which a deity could be present. Kagami mochi is set out for the toshigami, the deity of the incoming year, who is understood to visit the house over the New Year days. The two-tier stack gets explained in several ways — sun and moon, yin and yang, or simply one year settling on top of another. These are the readings that come with the tradition rather than a documented origin, and you will hear different ones in different households.
What is kagami-biraki, and when does it happen?
On kagami-biraki the offering is taken down and eaten, so that the household shares in what was offered. Most of Japan does this on 11 January; parts of the Kansai region keep to the 15th or the 20th instead. The move away from the 20th is usually attributed to the death of the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu on the twentieth day of a month, which is a tidy story repeated far more often than it is sourced. The verb used is “to open”, because “cut” and “break” are unlucky words for a New Year offering — and by January the mochi is rock hard anyway, so it is traditionally cracked apart with a wooden mallet rather than a knife.
What are the decorations on a kagami mochi?
A full arrangement carries a daidai, the bitter orange, whose name sounds like the word for “generation after generation”; urajiro fern, with white undersides taken to stand for honesty and long life; kombu, because the word can be heard inside yorokobu, “to rejoice”; and dried persimmons threaded on a skewer, for a family close together and content. These are the explanations that come with the tradition, not claims about what the objects do — most of them are puns. Arrangements vary from region to region, and the drawing here keeps to the common form: the daidai, the stand and the folded red-and-white paper, without the fern or the persimmons. The daidai is the one strong colour on the page, which is worth saving until last.
