Born in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan,[1] in 1951,[citation needed] Watanabe graduated from the Department of Photography of Nihon University in 1975 and moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a production coordinator for Japanese television commercials and later co-founded a Japanese coordination services company.
After five self-published books, Watanabe's first to be published conventionally was I See Angels Every Day, monochrome portraits of the patients and other scenes within San Lázaro psychiatric hospital in Quito, Ecuador.
This won the 2007 Photo City Sagamihara award for Japanese professional photographers.
[3] In 2007 Watanabe won a "Critical Mass" award from Photolucida that allowed publication of his monograph Findings.
In 2008, his work of North Korea won Santa Fe Center Project Competition First Prize, and the book titled "Ideology of Paradise" was published in Japan.