Jerome White Jr, A Japanese Superstar???

Fitted cap with the tags still on... check.

A fresh white du-rag... check.

Hip-hop gear dripping from head to toe... check.

Platinum chain and ice in each ear... check.

Jerome White Jr. easily passes the rapper certification exam with flying colors. He even has the ladies going crazy over him, whenever he performs.

The only difference.... these women are well into their sixties and they're all Japanese.

"Jero" as he is officially called, is Japan's newest musical sensation with his hugely successful singles on top of the pop charts. But he sure ain't successful singing in English or about anything remotely associated with hip-hop. Instead he croons about love lost on lonely Japanese cliffs in an old Japanese form of music called Enka (basically Japanese blues)

The 26 year-old singer, who's from the north side of Pittsburgh, for years had been covertly memorizing Enka with his grandmother in the home. He painstaking learned how to speak and write Japanese largely because of his love for the music.

Says one Japanese fan:
"I love the way he looks," gushed Sakura Takagi, a soap opera extra in her mid-30s who had traveled two hours by train to look at Jero. "He looks very kind and you can tell he is pure of heart."

So basically what you're telling me is that if I brush up on my Rosetta Stone and rock some generic hip-hop gear, I can be a Japanese superstar? Hmm...

I guess everybody has got their thing. Besides Japan does have a history of liking and doing some weird things. I give you exhibit 1, exhibit 2, and exhibit 3, just in cause you think I'm joking. So kids there's a lesson out there to all of you aspiring rappers and entertainer's, there's another way... you just have to be willing to learn three forms of Japanese, love Japan, and be obsessed with old Japanese blues.

Good Luck!

Jerome White Jr. Pictures

Entertainment-Japan-US-music, by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura US Enka or Japanese ballade singer Jero (C) performs the hip hop dance with dancers during his debut live stage on his song "Umi Yuki," or Marine Snow at a music store in Tokyo on Feburary 20, 2008. Jero, the 26-year-old African-American -- who had a Japanese grandmother -- has wowed audiences old and young with soulful singing in perfect Japanese combined with hip-hop style.