Jerome White Jr. wears a do-rag while crooning syrupy ballads — in perfect Japanese—¿ about lost love. Part Public Enemy, part Sinatra, part schmaltz, it’s an act the Japanese public has never seen before. Jero, as he is marketed here, has a hugely successful debut single on the pop charts and an album due this summer. When he makes personal appearances, thousands of people show up, many of them to swoon. He does especially well with Japanese women, ages 8 to 85. “I love the way he looks,” gushed Sakura Takagi, a soap opera extra in her mid-30s who had traveled two hours by train to see him. “You can tell he is pure of heart.” Jero, 26, comes to Japan by way of a working-class neighborhood on the north side of Pittsburgh. There, thanks to the records, videos and cassette tapes played by his Japanese-born grandmother, he got hooked on a melodramatic genre of Japanese folk balladry called ‘enka’. He started singing it in fractured Japanese at 5. As far as anybody in the music industry knows, Jero is the first African American to sing this shamelessly maudlin music for a living. Enka is usually sung by an aging Japanese performer (male or female) in a kimono. Suicide is nearly always a viable option in its ballads of unrequited love, hopeless love, cheating love and relentless rain. Enka became popular as a bathetic balm for the hard years that followed World War II. It was the sentimental mainstay of a million down-market karaoke bars. Until Jero burst upon Japan in February, it was also a musical genre that had lost much of its buzz. Most of the people who sang or listened to enka were double or triple Jero’s age. Jero, an accomplished dancer, seems to have stopped the music’s slide. His marriage of hip-hop imagery with a rainy-night-in-Osaka sound is new and way weird. His real ace is his late grandmother, Takiko, who met and married Jero’s grandfather when he was a sailor based in Yokohama. Japan is one of the world’s most racially homogenous countries. Jero, who does not look Japanese, rarely gives an interview without mentioning his grandmother, who died in 2005. Older Japanese fans say that for her sake they can easily overlook his baggy pants, the baseball cap worn askew and that do-rag. In the end, though, there is his sound. Jero stands still, clutches the microphone, looks heartbroken and serves up the suds. Jerome White Jr. was in the gifted programme at public high school in Pittsburgh. He was “very small, very nice and a quiet person,” recalls Isabel Valdivia, his Japanese teacher for four years. The Perry North neighborhood of his childhood can be a tough place to grow up. Most of its residents are working-class or poor with a sometimes-uneasy mix of African Americans and Eastern European immigrants. A passionate interest in singing enka music— and speaking Japanese does not offer a small, skinny, shy Afro-American kid a smooth path to popularity. For reasons he cannot explain, enka grabbed hold on his imagination: In all his dreams , he said, he sang only in Japanese. To master enka, one needs a strong grasp of spoken and written Japanese.There are three alphabts - hiragana, katakana and kanji (which is almost identical to Chinese and has about 2,000 characters to memorize for basic literacy). Jero taught himself the alphabets. He first traveled to Japan at 15, for a speech contest. At 20 he was an exchange student at an Osaka university. After graduating in 2003, he was back a—ain ¿ to stay. While teaching, he sought out karaoke and amateur singing contests. A judge at one of them was from Victor Entertainment. Victor gave him two years of voice lessons while he worked as an information engineer. In January, the record company offered him a chance to record a new ballad, “Umiyuki,” or “Ocean Snow.” Since its February release, Jero’s life has been a blur of media interviews. “They give me one day off a month,” Jero said. “I usually take the first flight out of Tokyo at 7 and finish the day in my hotel at 11. They want me to sell records, to get myself out there.” He has a captive and growing fan base. Fans always ask him why he doesn’t wear a kimono onstage, as other enka singers do, he said. But “if I did, it wouldn’t be me,” said Jero. -Blaine Harden
