Grilled Rice Cakes

Grilled rice cakes are a popular dish in Japan, turning up at street vendors’ stalls, at yakitori parlors, and even at highfalutin restaurants. The following recipe was inspired by the vendors outside the Sensoji Temple in Tokyo. You could probably use brown rice, although the Japanese barbecue buffs I met in Japan have an almost universal preference for white. Japanese grill jockeys don’t oil the rice cakes. Their grills don’t have grates, so the cakes are grilled on chopsticklike skewers