If you’re thinking of breaking into Japan’s tarento (talent) world, here’s a bit of advice: you gotta be original. Japan’s entertainment world is filled with singers, comedians and other famous people who often occupy mind-share with fans based on their originality, like the interesting twist that small-bodied cute girl Gal Sone brings to the TV screen as she shoves twelve plates of sushi down her throat. The foreigners who have found fame in Japan also depend on being unique, such as Bobby from Nigeria, who can really spice up a variety show about cooking, or the most famous Japanese-bilingual Italian in Japan, Girolamo Panzetta, who happens to be the only Japanese-bilingual Italian in Japan. The general rule is, if there’s already a foreigner who can make jokes in the dialect of rural Yamagata prefecture, there’s no need for a second one, so it’s important to have a Unique Selling Proposition if you want to make it big. Now the world of enka, the eerily beautiful traditional music of Japan, is getting an injection of soul with the debut of the first black enka singer this week. His name is JERO, short for Jerome, and the quarter-Japanese, three-quarter African American singer has been nicknamed Kurobune by the Japanese press, after Admiral Perry’s Black Ships. He grew up listening to his Japanese grandmother’s enka records, and he came to Japan after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh with the specific goal of becoming a singer in mind. His first single is Umiyuki, a song that captures the loneliness of the Sea of Japan in the winter, and it’s available on the Japan iTunes Store along with lots of other great Japanese songs from every genre.
