Jero

Jero is a Black ship

Jerome Charles White Jr. had something to prove when he came to Japan in 2003 and when, just after arriving, he entered a popular television singing competition. "Jero" sings enka, a Japanese soul with traditional hints and American country style lyrics about sad people doing sad things.　Jero has proven that he has singing talent beyond the marketing instinct for dissonance that would be a young, black, enka singer and that prefers hip-hop clothes to the traditional male enka singer's lounge tuxedo. Released in 2008, Umiyuki, a collection of standards, is now at the top of the enka charts and Jero's face is billboarded on the top of buildings all over Japan. Jero has surpassed initial hype and engaged an authentic audience.

Jero's career has also proven that for many in Japan, the Japanese identity is pure, and, like the traditional notion of white, no amount of Japanese heritage short of everybody-in-your-family-tree makes you Japanese. As Japan marvels over Jero's enka skills, articles mention it as a casual fact explaining his odd choice of the genre, and not an essential aspect of his ability to have mastered it "like" a native, that Jero's Japanese grandmother taught him enka when he was a young boy. Its true that a talent like Jero could probably fake a Russian or Tagalog tune, but in Japan's mainstream press, the Afro-Japanese crooner is an Afro-American who has astoundingly mastered a Japanese skill.

Tellingly, Jero has lately been called a blackship, evoking Admiral Perry's cannon flashing, "gift bearing," steamboats, and used figuratively for foreigners who seek to, like Perry and those who sent him, infiltrate and profit from Japan.

"this hair style probably got its name from 'needle punch carpeting,' a type of floor covering with a short and tightly curled nap"

Way back I used to cry that I hated my hair. My parents assured me that I was lucky to have the kind of hair that "people paid hundreds of dollars for." When you're seven and don't believe something both your parents tell you it has to be untrue. I had no doubt people paid for the wide curly and wavy hair growing on my brother and my cousin, but I knew for sure nobody was paying hundreds of dollars to turn perfectly good Brady Bunch hair into naps an peas. Given that I did not see the inside of a barber shop until I was 14 and that my mom cut my 'fro with scissors, its safe to say naps and peas are what I was sporting.





Mom, dad. You were right and I was wrong. People were indeed paying money for afro alchemy, turning straight hair kinky. Just not in Philadelphia. This was happening far, far away in the land where Johnny Socko lived with his flying robot and from which it was rumored that Speed Racer came too.

Its called the punch perm and first gained popularity in Japan in the 1960's, about the time black people in the States were taking clothing irons and lye to their heads in a quest to have straight hair or go bald trying.

"These days it is extremely rare to find anyone with a punch perm, regardless of their affiliations," assures wikipedia, meaning the author of this article has never been to Okayama Station where at any hour a pride of definitely "affiliated" oyaji (middle aged men) will roll by mini man-purses clutched in pinky ringed hands, punch perms jet black to blonde streaked to Malcom X red. Even in Tokyo you will see the odd punch perm, and in fact a regular salaryman looking guy in my building has one. I confess I want to ask him how much and how often for care and frankly, why? I have this feeling he read Spiderman comics as a kid and his favorite villain was Harry Osborn, who boasted the original punch perm.

There is another reason punch perms are still in the hairdresser's repertoire all over Japan, especially in fashion hubs such as Tokyo's Harajuku. The punch perm is done first so that typical Japanese hair can be knitted into firm dreadlocks.

So, I take it in stride when I am asked, even by a professional 'do master, how many years I have had my punch perm. '37.' I say proudly, remembering to subtract my first,bald, year.

Iona Rozeal Brown

I was raised by an artist and photographer mother in a house stacked with books and many other things, but more books than anything else, and many of them the big-heavy-picture kind. Our house was like the storage room of an exhibit though the exact subject of the exhibit would be impossible for anyone to guess. One of my most memorable and often "read" books, certainly because it seemed pornographic, was Masami Teraoka's McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan, published in 1975. I must also have seen 31 Flavors Invading Japan which came out in 1979, because I remember its images as well; all scenes of a non-world world of racial and cultural melanges, that seemed cool put together in a way that surprises, yet where everything fits coherently. The non-world Japanese landscape has recent occupants in Afro Samurai and the gun slinging Heike in Quinten Tarantino's Sukiyaki Western Django.

I recently came across the work of Iona Rozeal Brown who blackfaces traditional ukiyoe portrait subjects, and - like Teraoka - garnishes with modern elements. She calls it "Afro Asiatic Allegory."

僕を育て上げたのは写真家の母で、家の中には本だの何だのが山のように積み上げられていた。何よりも本が、数多あるものの中でもとりわけ多く、そのほとんどは大きくて重い絵画集の類だった。我が家は展覧会の作品保管庫みたいだったけれど、厳密にはいったい何の展覧会なのか、当ててみることすら誰にもままならなかったろう。かなり印象深くて、僕がたびたび『読んだ』本、ポルノグラフィックな感じだったことが確かにその理由なのだけれども、そのうちの一冊は、1975年に出版された Masami Teraoka の McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan だった。ほかにも、1979年に出された 31 Flavors Invading Japan も僕は目にしてるんだと思う。そこに載っているイメージの数々をよく覚えているから　ー　あらゆるシーン、人種も文化もごちゃ混ぜになったありえない世界を描いた世界の、ありとあらゆるシーンがクールにまとめ上げられている感じで、それは驚くようなやり方だというのに、何もかもがわかり易くしっくりしていた。そうした、ありえない日本の風景に、近ごろでは Afro Samurai の人物たちや、クゥエンティン・タランティーノのSukiyaki Western Djangoで銃撃戦を繰り広げる平氏たちが描き加えられている。最近ふと、Iona Rozeal Brown の作品に出会った。伝統的な浮世絵の肖像画は、褐色の肌を持ち、ーまるでTeraoka作品のようにー　現代の小物で身を飾っている。作者はそれをこう呼んでいる、Afro Asiatic Allegoryと。

Amazing 1939 footage of The Hot Mikado with Bill Robinson. This play was a commercial and larger scale redo of the WPA funded "Swing Mikado," whose premiere was attended by Eleanor Roosevelt. "The Hot Mikado" became a feature attraction of the World's Fair. Blackfolks dressed up as white folks' ersatz "Japanese."

O.G., The Original (Tokyo) Giants

1927. Hirohito warms up the mound (and would later offer a trophy). The first American professional baseball team to tour Nippon, an all-star roster calling itself the Royal Giants, works Japan to great excitement and a 23-0-1 final record, including the first out-of-the-park homerun at Tokyo's Jingu Stadium. Representative of the Philadelphia Stars, (and current Hall of Fame candidate), Biz Mackey makes a special impression on the Japanese and the team tours as they could never do in many parts of home, staying at local hotels and eating in local restaurants.

Where is the Black Pacific?

On my shorter list of favorite books is Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment by Larry Wolff. In graduate school I had the chance to study with Paul Gilroy, the influential author of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Both books scratched new parts of my brain as through them I meditated on space/place and race. How whole places get invented by a shared idea of who is supposed to be living in them and for what task in the unfolding of human history. Gilroy's book kneads the major idea of WEB DuBois, for whom the Pacific was also a crucial place to chart race through history. Du Bois loved the actual country Japan and even more so the idea of Japan. Most of all, he loved the idea that black people shared with Japan a local and global destiny.

According to a seminal author on the theme of blacks and Japan, Reginald Kearny, Japan's 1905 triumph over Russia was a drama worthy of barber shop newspaper readings and championship bout-like bragging. Black Americans took it personally and pridefully that a brown nation could beat up a white one, and were nearly as angry as the Japanese themselves (who rioted in Tokyo's Hibiya Park) when Teddy Roosevelt sued for a peace whose terms many in both groups thought was beneath the dignity and entitlement of a proper victor. Roosevelt understood the power of Japan even if it made him uncomfortable as he later worried that white thugs in California could provoke a war with Japan by increasingly vicious assaults on Japanese Americans and distinguished visitors from that allied country. Blacks, looking South, thereby measured the influence of a country with an army on the ability of whites to take provincial race violence in America seriously.

Etsuko Taketani, the Tsukuba University professor of literature, describes the "black Pacifc" imagined in James Weldon Johnson's 1933 autobiography Along This Way, and most interestingly, how the globe spinning in Johnson's head, was "continuous and contiguous" with the larger cartography of American internationalists.

Because, the implications of a militarized, imperialist, colonizing non-white nation in a thoroughly racist world, however gratifying, are neither radical nor subversive of order and hierarchy. Black Nationalists loved Japan because it was like the white powers, not because it was different. Perhaps even the shared "asian-ness" of Japanese and Koreans and Chinese made the second two nation's colonization more brutal, at least the same, and certainly not less, a fact which settled slowest on Du Bois whose major career mistake could be his reality-altering loyalty to the idea of a noble Japan.

But if the imagining of a Black Pacific in which colored people on all sides thought themselves as part of a different kind of co-prosperity sphere is neither radical nor subversive it is nonetheless fascinating and illuminating.