Her mother suffered from a tubercular infection so the family frequently moved in search of more favorable housing and climate, meaning constant school changes for their daughter.

[3] Watanabe attended Theodore Roosevelt High School, followed by the University of Southern California, where she majored in piano.

thesis was "Music at the Court of Henry VIII," which won the Mu Phi Epsilon 1946 Musicological Research Competition.

[3] Her plan to earn a Ph.D. in English was interrupted by the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

In April 1942, following the signing of Executive Order 9066, they were involuntarily relocated to the Santa Anita Assembly Center, living in barracks constructed on the parking lot of a racetrack behind barbed wire.

[3][6] One of her USC professors, Pauline Alderman, offered her advice she credited with helping her through her internment experience: "As long as you're alive, there's nothing you can't live without.

"[3] Internees at all the camps and centers engaged in a wide variety of educational and recreational pursuits, and at Santa Anita that included a newspaper, a library, and regular concerts using the racetrack's grandstand and audio equipment.

She wrote to Backus:My program notes include a short biographical sketch of each composer, a brief resume of his chief contributions and characteristics, and specific details concerning the works to be heard.

[6] The community constructed at Santa Anita that summer came to an end when the US government began shipping detainees to concentration camps in the interior of the US.

Watanabe and her family were transferred to the Granada War Relocation Center - known as "Camp Amache" - in Colorado in September 1942.

In late September, she received a telegram Howard Hanson, director of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, offering her a fellowship.

By 1944 she had a full-time job as head of circulation, whose responsibilities included "answering 'real' reference questions, keeping an eye on rare books, tabulating statistics...and supervising the annual inventory.

Hanson had frequently clashed with Duncan and preferred a librarian with Watanabe's background in music performance.

She also struggled to find time to finish her PhD dissertation, "Five Italian Madrigal Books of the Late 16th Century: A Transcription and Study of the First Books a cinque by Antonio il Verso, Bartolomeo Roy, Bernardino Scaramella, Pietro Paolo Quartieri, and Emilio Virgelli," but persisted with the help of a fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the assistance of Dr. Alfred Einstein, who proofread 400 pages of her transcriptions of Italian madrigals for no charge.