EXPERIMENTS ON THE PROCESSING OF PERSIMMONS TO 

 RENDER THEM NONASTRINGENT. 



INTRODUCTION. 



By DAVID FAIRCHILD, 

 Agricultural Explorer, Bureau of Plant Industry. 



The popularity of the oriental persimmon or kaki is not what it 

 deserves to be, and one of the chief reasons for this lies in the fact 

 that Americans have not learned how to process them as the Japanese 

 do, to remove the tannin and leave the fruit almost as hard and firm 

 as apples. There is a general objection to the mucilaginous character 

 of the fully ripe, soft Japan persimmon which seems to be difficult 

 ! or the American growers to overcome, and although its sale is 

 ncreasing steadily in this country, this industry, which in China and 

 Japan ranks among the most important of fruit industries, is in its 

 nfaiicy, notwithstanding the fact that the Japanese called their 

 persimmons to the attention of Americans a half century ago. 



The first description in American literature which the writer has 

 discovered of the method used by the Japanese in the processing of 

 /heir persimmons is that of Prof. Tamari in the Transactions of the 

 !dichigan Horticultural Society for 1886. Prof. Tamari was one of 

 ;he first students of American agriculture sent by the Japanese 

 jrovernment to study our agricultural institutions, and it is a curious 

 ! act that this description which he gave affecting a transplanted 

 Japanese plant industry should have been so entirely overlooked by 

 ;hose who were engaged in the attempt to make it a success. 



In 1899 Dr. S. A. Knapp, while traveling in Japan as an agricultural 

 explorer, sent in a collection of Japanese persimmon plants, and in 

 lis description of them he made reference to the method of processing 

 used by the Japanese, but no one growing the fruit seems to have 

 iaken note of his reference. 



That the processing of persimmons had been untried by the 

 growers in this country until 1906 is an indication of the complicated 

 nature of the whole problem of transplanting an industry from one 

 country to another, and the value of special investigations by experts 

 in those countries from which the plant industries come to us. 



The first trial of the Japanese method of processing persimmons 

 ever made in this country was that made at the writer's suggestion, 



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