Sweet treats from Japan

After lunch, we stopped by Mitsuwa to pick up some Japanese ingredients. Mitsuwa is a Japanese superstore where you can pick up almost any kind of Japanese ingredient or food. It also has a liquor store, bakery, bookstore, video rental store and foodcourt. I picked up some eringi and shiitake mushrooms, daikon and renkon roots, mirin, rice vinegar, nori, tofu, etc. Ok, I'm throwing a bunch of strange names out at you, but these are just some of the typical foodstuffs used in Japanese cooking. Hopefully, I'll be using some of these things in the next days to come.

After we dropped my dad off at the airport, my sister and mom dropped us off at home. My dad frequently takes business trips to Japan and, like always, picked up a few of our favorite treats from Japan. Here's one such Japanese treat.

The package says "uguisu mochi" and this is a typical Japanese sweet. While uguisu means Japanese bush warbler (see Wikipedia.com entry), this sweet treat, of course, doesn't actually have uguisu in it. However, I don't know enough about the history of this treat to know why it's called uguisu mochi. If anyone has any insight, please feel free to post a comment.
What I do know is that this treat is red bean paste (anko) enclosed in a rice cake (mochi) layer with sweetened soybean flour or kinako (see epicurious.com description) sprinkled on top. When I got home, I wanted a comforting and simple afternoon snack to forget about the stormy weather. I made myself some green tea and enjoyed two of these delicious snacks. Mmm... it wasn't so bad that it was raining and thundering...