They have invaded sumo wrestling, they have mastered the art of drawing manga and they have even become the presidents of beloved national symbols such as Nissan and Sony.

However, there has always been one corner of Japanese culture that has been kept off-limits to foreigners: the melodrama of enka. This was the music, belted out with remorseless passion in bars and rough theatres, that saw Japan through its desolate postwar years. This was the music that made both a tuneful and tearful virtue of unrequited desire, of marriage gone sour and of lovelorn suicide.

This was music so fundamentally Japanese that it created karaoke.

Now, at the hands – and talented larynx – of a 26-year-old from Pittsburgh, it is the music that has gone hip-hop. The Japanese lyrics are the same, the nostalgic sentimentality still stifling, but the performance is now wrapped in a hoodie and bling.

The odds against enka stardom for Jerome White Jr – or Jero, as he is marketed to the Japanese – appear long, but the country has fallen in love with this cocktail of styles. Jero’s debut single has set a record as the fastest-selling enka song on the Oricon weekly pop charts, and a waning musical genre is making a comeback.

Although originally a form of 19th-century political oratory, enka in its current form began in the late 1940s when its singers and its audience were predominantly young. The music – in many ways the theme tune of the Japanese economic miracle and the birth of the salaryman culture – subsequently grew up with them.

The singers aged, the melodrama and the kimonos seemed to be a bit over the top and enka was relegated to weekday-matinee status as the Westernised Japanese pop culture dominated prime-time entertainment.

As a consequence, the music that ruled the Japanese charts for decades had been written off by Japan’s music industry as a commercial dead end. There has been only passing attention paid to the tastes of elderly housewives and maudlin executives – a deeply conservative section of Japanese society that is regarded as unlikely to embrace anything new, much less a young, black American with enormous trousers.

The music industry was wrong. A few weeks after the release of the debut single, Umiyuki, Jero’s record label, Japan Victor, optimistically expected 250 people to appear for a live performance and disc signing outside Tower Records in central Osaka. More than 3,000 turned up and the company is now looking at much bigger venues.

Perhaps more unexpected, though, was the demographic of the fanbase. There was the expected dominance of elderly women, but their daughters and granddaughters had also come along en masse. “Young people in Japan shun enka because it’s enka,” Jero toldThe Times, “but the presumption that it is only for an older generation is wrong. My goal is to bring a great old genre to a new generation.”

Several factors lie behind Jero’s surprise appeal, not least his technical perfection of the classic enka form. The dancing and the clothes are from modern America but the songs are undiluted old Japan. A fluent speaker of Japanese, he sings with perfect intonation – his only fault, the enka purists say, is that he does not indulge in the emotional throat-growl of yesteryear.

The secret, Jero told The Times, is that he is one-quarter Japanese: his ambition of reviving enka “is a matter of my heritage”. His grandmother married a US serviceman and emigrated to Pittsburgh, in the northeastern state of Pennsylvania. From the age of 6 Jerome began raiding his grandmother’s enka record collection and mimicking what he heard.

It was only years later, when he began to learn Japanese at school, that he discovered that the songs were about broken-hearted lovers threatening to hurl themselves off mountain tops. His debut single, in tribute to his early enka exposure, tells a broadly similar story.

Jero’s route from the University of Pittsburgh to stardom in Japan has been complex, involving a series of dreary jobs and a punishing weekend schedule of karaoke competitions across the country.

So far the focus has been on the music but Jero admits that now that he has entered the realm of celebrity in Japan other priorities will emerge. The country’s entertainment industry, especially music, has a notoriously brutal history of producing and then destroying its idols. Foreigners have only ever entered this world as short-lived gimmicks and Jero is determined to avoid a similar fate. It is for this reason, he says, that he has strenuously avoided letting his record label dictate his look and his appearance.

“My look has definitely not been crafted by Victor. They may think they know about hip-hop, but they know absolutely nothing,” he said. “A kimono – that’s overboard for me. If I did that, it would just look like a stunt. I’m definitely not a stunt. I don’t want to go on any game shows.”

Umiyuki

From the freezing sky
Snow falls down to the sea
Drifts on to the waves and
Vanishes without a trace

Darling, no matter how much I love you
You never love me back
Darling, shall I throw myself in?

Following you to Izumozaki
The Japan Sea of Sorrow
I’ve lost your love and I’m standing on the cliff
The tears that fall are just snow on the ocean, which never settles

Source: Japan Victor

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