Jero was born and raised in Pittsburgh, he fell in love with the melodramatic music enka. He began singing Enka actively at the age of six. He first began pursuing his dream to become an Enka artist because of the influence of his Japanese grandmother Takiko, who raised him. His parents divorced when he was young, he was reared amid a strong sense of Japanese.
His grandmother, originally from Yokohama, first introduced Jero to Enka and it was under her guidance that he grew to love the genre as a child. Jero is very well loved and known in Japan. He has also capture the hearts of many people in the United States with his beautiful Eenka music.
Enka (演�) is a popular Japanese music genre considered to resemble traditional Japanese music stylistically. Modern enka, however, is a relatively recent musical form which arose in the context of such postwar expressions of modern Japanese nonmaterial nationalism as nih
Modern enka, as developed in the postwar era, is a form of sentimental ballad music. Some of the first modern enka singers were Hachiro Kasuga, Michiya Mihashi, and Hideo Murata.[2] The revival of enka in its modern form is said to date from 1969, when Keiko Fuji made her debut.