I’m pretty sure this is conflating two different Japanese food products that are both called “mochi” here in the U.S. 99% of the mochi one meets in the U.S. is of the pictured kind, the dessert. But there is another, much more common in Japan than here, which appears to be what you would get were you to take ordinary semi-cooked rice and put it in a hydraulic press until it became a single, massive, squishy rice grain.
The definition of “dessert” in Japan is… foreign. It includes, for example, boiling one of these massive rice grains until it is gelatinous, and dipping it in crushed peanut. (My feeling was: is there supposed to be chocolate involved and they forgot it?) You can try to chew bites off this half-dried Elmer’s Glue capsule but eventually you give up and swallow it whole. Or not, and you die, apparently.
[ETA “in the U.S.” after “here”. How embarassing]
