Jero
| Jero | |
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Jero Performing
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Jerome Charles White, Jr. |
| Born | September 4, 1981 |
| Origin | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Genres | Enka |
| Occupation(s) | Singer, computer engineer |
| Years active | 2007-Present |
| Labels | Victor Entertainment |
| Website | http://www.jvcmusic.co.jp/jero/ |
Jerome Charles White, Jr. (born September 4, 1981), better known by his stage name Jero (ジェロ?), is an American enka singer of African-American and Japanese descent. He is the first black enka singer in Japanese music history.
Jero began singing Enka actively at the age of six and continued to study the Japanese language all throughout high school and college. He also studied Japanese for some time at the Kansai Gaidai University school of foreign languages. Jero majored in information science at University of Pittsburgh and graduated in 2003, and moved to Japan in the same year. Two months after arriving in Japan, he entered the NHK Nodo Jiman competition broadcast on TV.
Jero first began pursuing his dream to become an Enka artist because of the influence of his Japanese grandmother Takiko, who had met his grandfather, an African-American serviceman, at a dance during World War II. They married, had a daughter, Harumi - now a department store sales clerk - and eventually moved to his grandfather's hometown, Pittsburgh. His parents divorced when he was young, and he was reared amid a strong sense of Japanese culture.
His grandmother, originally from Yokohama, Japan, first introduced Jero to Enka and it was under her guidance that he grew to love the genre as a child. Jero, who majored in information technology at the University of Pittsburgh, did not initially imagine himself in a career as an Enka singer. Rather, after he permanently moved to Japan, his main forms of employment were as an English teacher at NOVA and as a computer engineer. He only began to actively work towards becoming an Enka singer because he had promised his grandmother that one day he would someday perform at the annual Kohaku Uta Gassen song show. As a result, he actively participated in numerous singing contests while he continued to work as a computer engineer and eventually achieved real success after only two months since he had arrived in Japan. His grandmother never was able to see her grandson achieve Enka fame, she died in 2005, three years before he became famous.
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Wikipedia