A Far Cry From Home

"You have to remember 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 that none of his dancing friends in high school knew what he was up to at grandma's house. (According to Valdivia, there was a much-used karaoke machine at that 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. I explained that enka is a form of Japanese blues."

It was in grandma's house, Jero said, that he began dreaming about performing onstage. For reasons he cannot explain, enka grabbed an exclusive and unshakable hold on his musical 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," said Valdivia, his Japanese teacher. "He was really good, he worked really hard and he was really into that [enka] music."

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At the University of Pittsburgh, he studied information science. But it was always a sideline.

He made his first trip to Japan at 15, as a participant in a speech contest. At 20, he was back, as an exchange student at a university in Osaka. After graduating from college 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, which he took while working as an information engineer in Osaka.