A concussion waiting to happen

In Japan it's a tradition to throw mochi off of the roof of a house when it's under construction. It ensures good luck. So pretty much when the whole skeleton of the house is put up everyone in a 5 mile radius rushes over to stand next the construction site and catch the mochi. I can't remember if I explained what mochi is but it's pounded rice. It turns into a sort of doughy consistency. It gets pretty darn heavy, especially when it plummets to the ground from the roof of a house. There are three sizes of mochi they throw: tiny, regular, and HUGE. The huge mochi are about the size of your face and have to way like, 3 pounds.

The workers climb up to the very top with baskets of the stuff.They just throw them up in the air and everyone on the ground scrambles around trying to get as many as possible. My host brother was somewhere in the crowd and we ended up getting a huge bag of mochi which we ate as snacks for a few weeks after.

It's gotta be one of the best parts of being a construction worker because all of the workers have huge smiles on their faces in the pictures.

Here is one of the HUGE mochi....it doesn't look so big but it was and if I recall everyone ran for cover except a middle aged guy who caught it like a sack of flour....a sack of flour from the sky that is...for those of you who don't know what that looks like he pretty much started to fall backwards because of the weight of the thing and almost tripped over the person behind him.