I plan to try with the American persimmons anyway. I know part of the problem is the calyx detaches when it’s soft ripe, but it clings before then in my limited experience. So it might work. The other problem is how much smaller they are. A lot more work to peel. I wonder if you could dip in hot water to peel them like you can with peaches and tomatoes.
A persimmons have thin skin. When ripened, they are rather mushy. Peeling them would be challenging.
I assume they would take longer time to air-dry. I never thought of drying A persimmons Hoshigaki way. That would be interesting.
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I think the trick would be to pick them when they’ve colored up but are still hard, like an astringent kaki. The thin skin could be challenging, but I’ve got at least a few years to think that over.
So do I remember correctly that these are made from still firm,
un ripe ,astringent kakis ?
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Yup, mine were still hard when I peeled them to dry. You can’t exactly massage them when they’re soft. That would be disastrously messy!
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That’s my understanding. I think @tonyOmahaz5 has done hoshigaki with JT-02, but I may have imagined that. I don’t think American persimmons are so different that the physiology isn’t there to lose astringency in the same way.
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I think American persimmons actually are different. Neither freezing nor dehydrating seems to remove astringency from even slightly under-ripe American persimmons in my experience. I have successfully removed astringency from some hybrid persimmons by dehydrating, though.
The friends I mentioned from Greensboro moved back to Korea maybe 3 years ago, and it might have been a year or two before that that they dried the persimmons (at least the ones I know about), so maybe it was before SWD? I don’t really know why they didn’t have trouble from SWD.
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Good info. Was it a slow dehydration or quick like in a countertop dehydrator? I’ve been thinking about why hoshigaki works, and my working theory is that since it takes so long, they’re actually still ripening/softening as they would normally while they dry. I remember reading somewhere (can’t remember where) that it won’t work well in areas where it’s too dry because it dries out too quickly. But I’ve only read about this, so I’ll have to defer to your experience for now. I wonder if perhaps virginiana cultivars just have a higher total amount of tannins to work through? Because the mechanism by which they’re neutralized has got to be the same. That’s a trickier thing to evolve than just the quantity of tannins.
I’ve never actually had luck with the freezing, even for kakis. That being said, my experience is limited to a handful of store bought Hachiya that turned out not to have softened quite enough…
I was just rewatching this video, and it looks like they’ve cut out all the good summer pruning footage 
You can graft Japanese persimmon on American persimmon trees.
After the leave fall off the trees, the orange fruit looks like Christmas ornaments, just hanging in the trees
that are fifteen to twenty five feet high. The deer love them & eat them as they fall to the ground.
If you know any Spanish there are videos on YouTube about green pruning persimmons that are absolutely phenomenal with very important information that was left out of the Japanese video