"Brazil's Japanese community marked the close of 2025 on Wednesday with the annual Moti Tsui Matsuri in Sao Paulo's Liberdade neighbourhood - a traditional mochi festival celebrating gratitude for the year's blessings and hopes for prosperity in the year ahead. Footage shows participants making mochi before a large crowd of spectators, with a Japanese priest later seen blessing the dessert before it was handed out. "Every year I come to pick up the mochi, which is at the end of the year, to start the year well. It is very good to be here in the Liberdade neighbourhood," one attendee said. "It is distributed to the whole town as a form of grace. Mochi is the symbol of Japanese food," another added. The celebration opened with a religious ceremony, during which community leaders and attendees took part in purification and offering rituals. For more than half a century, the Japanese community in Brazil has organised the Moti Tsuki Matsuri each year, centred around the tusk ritual - the collective pounding of moti, or glutinous rice, with wooden mallets until it forms a paste. The ceremony symbolises unity, community strength, gratitude and wishes for good fortune. In Japanese culture, mochi represents luck and prosperity. During this year's event, around 30,000 pieces were distributed free to the public, a gesture meant to share hopes for peace, prosperity and good fortune in 2026. Beyond the food, the square came alive with traditional music performances and Japanese dances, filling the space with colour and sound. This year's Moti Tsuki Matsuri also holds special significance, as it forms part of a series of cultural events marking 130 years of friendship and diplomatic relations between Brazil and Japan. Today, Brazil is home to the largest Japanese community outside Japan, concentrated mainly in Sao Paulo, where these traditions continue to be passed down from generation to generation."