The holidays are a season of tradition, and perhaps none is more loved on Bainbridge than the tradition which, in fact, signals the end of the season and the start of the new year: the annual mochi tsuki event.

The 26th annual Bainbridge Island mochi tsuki (moe-chee-zu-key) drew a crowd of more than 900 people, despite the rain and the chill, to IslandWood Sunday, Jan. 4, according to event organizers.

For over a millennium, making and eating the sweet rice treat mochi has been a celebrated New Year’s tradition in Japan, with generations of families and communities coming together to wish good health and prosperity for the new year.

The Bainbridge Island tradition is one of the nation’s longest-running public mochi tsuki events.

Though the audience was diminished from last year’s record-setting throng of nearly 2,000 attendees, Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Association president Clarence Moriwaki said he and the other event organizers were very happy with the turnout.

Clearly, he said, the tradition had lost no community support, and indeed appeared more popular than ever in this, nearly it’s 30th year.

“We’re all incredibly pleased,” he said, adding that while the rain and cold may have scared off a few potential guests it “clearly didn’t dampen anyone’s spirit” at the event.

“We got a lot of wonderful feedback,” Moriwaki said. “It seems to just be growing.”

Again in attendance this year was Congressman Derek Kilmer, whose bill to officially recognize a new name for the Bainbridge Island memorial to Japanese Americans forced from their homes during World War II was unanimously passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last year.

The legislation ensured the site is properly recognized as the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial.

The Near Year’s event offered guests the chance to get as involved as they desired in the Japanese cultural tradition.

Members of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American community and volunteers prepared some batches of mochi in the centuries-old method of first steaming the sweet rice over an open fire, then placing the cooked rice into a warm stone or concrete bowl (called an usu), before calling on willing volunteers from the audience to help with the fun part.

Using large wooden mallets, two or more people then rhythmically pounded the rice in the usu while another person swiftly moved the rice between each mallet crash.

The event’s success was bittersweet this year, Moriwaki explained, as it was the first Bainbridge mochi tsuki since the recent deaths of Frank Kitamoto and Fumiko Hayashida, both prominent members of the island’s Japanese American community.

“Every person in the community is important but they were pretty iconic,” he said.

Kitamoto, a longtime dentist on Bainbridge Island, was better known for his work to preserve and share the history of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and was a founding member of the mochi tsuki event.

Hayashida was the oldest living survivor of the first group of Japanese Americans who were taken to internment camps from Bainbridge at the start of World War II and became a celebrity of sorts after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a photograph of her holding her baby at the Eagledale Ferry Landing, where the first group of Japanese Americans were removed from Bainbridge just four months after Pearl Harbor. The image was published around the world.

Both Kitamoto and Hayashida passed away in 2014.