His debut single, Umiyuki (Ocean Snow), entered the top 5 in 2008, whipping elderly Japanese ladies into a nostalgic frenzy as they remembered the joys of hearing enka in their youth.
Before Jero, enka was thought of as commercially obsolete.
Who knows, maybe the enka revolution could soon be heading to a country near you.
When other kids on the block were listening to Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, six-year-old Jero was introduced to the wistful ways of enka singers like Hibari Misora and Keiko Fuji.
Jero, you see, is the first black enka singer in the history of Japanese music, and he has single-handedly reignited interest in a soppy genre popular in the 60s and 70s but that has since been regarded as a joke.
In recent years, this low-rise area of traditional izakaya bars and narrow alleys has spawned a new music scene that knits together every musical style imaginable — American roots, Showa Era jazz and even enka, the sentimental pop music of postwar Japan — in a way that is distinctly Japanese.
The biggest infrastructure project in Kosovo's post-Yugoslav history, a 63-mile stretch of highway connecting Pristina to the Albanian border, was awarded in 2010 to Bechtel of San Francisco in a joint venture with a Turkish company, Enka.
Four of the eight bore surnames with that eastern European ending and a fifth finished with "Enka" (Victoria Azarenka, from Belarus).
Saturday at 5 p.m., "Do Enka: East Meets West," a performance of jazz, blues and spoken word featuring Thelonius Monk Jr., a drummer, and Yuchiro Oda, a guitarist; reservations: (212) 92122120.
He had flown into Milan for two days with his parents to participate in an important design competition sponsored by Enka, the world's largest manufacturer of viscose filament yarn.
