Maru Persimmon

Maru, also called Zenji Maru, has a genuinely long and well-documented history dating back to 1214, near Japan's Ozenji Temple, with its cultivation popularized in the 14th century. It received real imperial recognition in 1909, when Emperor Meiji was presented with the fruit as a gift, and cultivation subsequently spread into Hiroshima, Kanto, and Fukushima Prefectures in the early 1900s. By 1910, though, farmers increasingly replaced their Maru trees with more commercially reliable varieties, and cultivation declined so sharply that the Japanese government designated seven surviving Maru trees as registered cultural monuments in 2007 to help preserve the variety. It reached the United States sometime in the mid-to-late 19th century, when the USDA imported grafted trees from Japan for trial planting in California and the South, and was further spread by Japanese immigrant families growing it in home gardens. It remains genuinely rare and difficult to find commercially even today. Worth noting: multiple real sources describe Maru as "often mistakenly called Chocolate" due to its similarly dark flesh when pollinated — meaning this entry may represent the same underlying variety as "Chocolate Persimmon," documented separately elsewhere in this database, rather than a genuinely distinct cultivar. Unpollinated fruit stays orange and can be astringent; pollinated fruit develops the dark, chocolate-brown flesh the variety is prized for, with a rich, sweet, non-cloying flavor.