Jero

Jerome Charles White Jr., better known by his stage name Jero (ジェロ), is an American-born enka singer of African-American and Japanese descent who is the first black enka singer in Japanese music history.

Jero began singing Enka 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.

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.

In 2018, Jero announced that he was taking an indefinite hiatus from his music career to focus on a career in computers.

(Source: Wikipedia)