A Far Cry From Home

Japan is one of the world's most racially homogenous countries. Xenophobia is difficult to avoid. The Japanese people and their politicians often associate foreigners with crime, litter, sloth and other unpleasantness.

Jero, who does not look at all Japanese, rarely gives an interview to the local media 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.

"The fact that he treasures his grandmother makes me feel warm toward him," said Masako Osawa, 59, a housewife who checked Jero out at the Big Hop mall.

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?"

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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 African Americans 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 African American kid a smooth path to popularity.

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