Sexy Hot Beauty

Pittsburgh native Jerome White Jr. is the biggest star that you never heard of. Wearing a do-rag and askew baseball cap, he croons syrupy ballads with a Sinatra-meets-Jarreau style. This 26 year old has mobs of women screaming after him.

His songs about lost love are sung in perfect Japanese.

His fan base is also Japanese.

Jero (his professional moniker), is something unique. An African-American man (his maternal grandmother was Japanese) who has a hip-hop persona singing ballads that are distinctly Japanese accompanied by over-the-top symphonic orchestrations. That is definitely a first. And, there probably won’t be a second.

Keep in mind that Japan is one of the most homogeneous countries on earth. Gaijin (foreigners) are generally associated with crime, litter, sloth and other unpleasantness. Xenophobia is the overwhelming attitude of most Japanese… which would seem to make Jero’s success impossible.

The one thing that makes him the exception to the hard-lined rule is his grandmother.

Masako Osawa, a 59 year old Japanese housewife, caught Jero’s appearance at the Big Hop mall. According to The Washington Post, she said:

“The fact that he treasures his grandmother makes me feel warm toward him.”

“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. “He looks very kind and you can tell he is pure of heart.”

There, thanks to the records, videos and cassette tapes played by his Japanese-born grandmother, that he got hooked on a melodramatic genre of Japanese folk balladry called enka. With no idea what the lyrics meant, he started singing it in fractured Japanese at 5. As far as anybody in the music industry knows, Jero is the first black to sing this shamelessly maudlin music for a living.

Enka wallows in heartache. Accompanied by over-the-top orchestration, it 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.

Jero, an accomplished dancer with a big honeyed voice, seems to have stopped the music’s slide. His marriage of hip-hop imagery with a rainy-night-in-Osaka sound is utterly new and way weird. Yet Japanese music critics and the Japanese public say it works for them.

In the end, though, there is his sound.

It’s been slightly vivified by hip-hop but remains true to enka’s treacle-soaked, my-woman-dumped-me roots. Jero often performs hip-hop dance moves before he sings and sometimes afterward but never while singing. He stands still, clutches the microphone, looks heartbroken and serves up the suds.

In his first single, which jumped to No. 4 on the Japanese pop charts, the highest-ever debut ranking for an enka performer, Jero sings about standing on a cliff overlooking the “Japan Sea of Sorrow.”

He’s longing for a girl who doesn’t love him anymore.

He asks himself the existential question that all highly remunerated enka crooners must pose at such a moment: “Darling, shall I throw myself in?”

***

“His singing has this quality that is different from the usual heaviness of enka,” said Masakazu Kitanaka, one of Japan’s best-known popular music critics. “He has something fresh and crisp. He is easy on the ears of those who don’t usually listen to enka and those who do think he is charming. I don’t feel any incongruity for how he is dressed.”

Then there is his ace in the hole: his late grandmother, Takiko, who met and married Jero’s grandfather when he was a sailor based in Yokohama.

Jero, who does not look at all Japanese, rarely gives an interview without bringing up 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.

Jerome White Jr. was in the gifted program at Perry Traditional Academy, a 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 can be a tough place to grow up. Most of its residents are working-class or poor, with a sometimes-uneasy mix of blacks and Eastern European immigrants. As Valdivia explains the dynamics of the neighborhood, a passionate interest in singing enka music — and speaking Japanese — does not offer a small, skinny, shy black kid a smooth path to popularity.

So he more or less kept his mouth shut about enka, and found another way.

“Jerome was a gifted kid and he could think for himself,” Valdivia said. “Normally, gifted kids don’t dance, but he joined the dance team at Perry. It was all African-Americans and he was the first boy on the team. They performed with the band during football games. Other boys joined the team after he did.”

In an interview in the Tokyo offices of his record company, Jero said none of his dancing friends in high school knew what he was up to at Grandma’s house. “They knew my grandmother was from Japan,” Jero said. “They didn’t know I was listening to enka. My friends in Pittsburgh didn’t know about it until my debut single was released. I called them and told them I was a recording artist in Japan.”

For reasons he cannot explain, enka grabbed hold on his imagination: In all his dreams about making it big, he said, he sang only in Japanese.

To master enka, one needs a strong grasp of spoken and written Japanese, which is no easy trick. For non-natives, Japanese is among the world’s most difficult languages. There are three alphabets — hiragana, katakana and kanji (which is almost identical to Chinese and has about 2,000 characters to memorize for basic literacy).

To read the record jackets of his favorite enka singers, Jero taught himself the alphabets. He had an ear for the sound of Japanese from listening to his grandmother gossip with his mother, who left Japan as an adolescent. But it wasn’t until high school that he could seriously dig into the language.

“Jerome was special,” Valdivia said. “He was really good, he worked really hard and he was really into that music.”

***

At the University of Pittsburgh, he studied information science, but it was always a sideline. 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 again — to stay.

“I came to Japan as an English teacher,” Jero said. “It was the easiest way to get over here.”

While teaching, he sought out karaoke and amateur singing contests. A judge at one of them was from Victor Entertainment, which would become his record label. 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.” It’s slightly upbeat, but, in the mournful enka mainstream, has a tight focus on love gone wrong and suicidal torment.

Since its February release, Jero’s life has been a blur of newspaper, radio and television interviews. He travels to in-store events and performs in shopping malls. The Washington Post waited about six weeks before his record label could schedule a 30-minute interview.

“They give me one day off a month,” Jero said of his handlers. “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.”

Jero said he intends to stay in Japan for the long term and has no plans to sing any music other than enka. He wants to expand the genre’s audience and keep it from “getting grayed out.”

That’s a tall order. Japan has the world’s oldest population, with the largest proportion of people over 65 and the smallest proportion of children under 15.

Still, if Jero could become accustomed to an audience of mostly geezers, he has a captive and growing fan base. By 2040, the old will outnumber the young in Japan by four to one. These demographics may prove to be the salvation of enka.

As for his rapper look, Jero wants it known that it was his idea — not the record company’s.

“I have been wearing hip-hop clothes since high school,” he said. “It is not something that has been pushed on me.”

He said fans always ask him why he doesn’t wear a kimono onstage, like all the other enka singers.

“If I did, it wouldn’t be me,” he said. “It would be perceived as something that was made up.”

***

Victor Entertainment declined to comment when asked how much Jero is making from his recording contract and appearances. (An official from the company said: “Music is about dreams, and if numbers on pay come out, that overwrites dreams.”) People with knowledge of the Japanese music industry say the singer is probably on contract, with a relatively modest salary that would increase substantially if he has a number of breakout hits.

The Japanese have a famously fickle appetite for pop-culture fads. This is the country of Hello Kitty and manga, pachinko and loose socks on leggy teenage girls. Whether Jero will come and go like loose socks is unclear — but Kitanaka, the music critic, believes Jero has a solid chance for a long career, thanks to the quality of his voice and the sincerity he projects onstage.

At the Big Hop shopping center, Jero belted out ballads from his soon-to-be-released album, which will cover some of the best-known enka classics.

He was dressed in his usual hip-hop garb, but didn’t attempt a single dance step. Instead, with quiet sincerity and shy little waves, he crooned about cold rain, too much booze and a long-gone woman.

Between songs, after bowing deeply, Jero assured his devoted mall audience that he sometime drinks, but never to excess, and that he does not fight.

When the songs were over, several hundred people — most of them women, many of them on the far side of 60 — queued up to buy his CD, tell him he is wonderful and give him a little hug.

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.

Via Dwacon’s Blog