His father, a onetime count, was a playmate of Akihito's father, Emperor Hirohito. Watanabe began his career, in 1959, as a diplomat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His first palace job was as grand master of ceremonies. The Emperor and Empress personally approved him for his current job in 1996. Watanabe's life is tightly intertwined with that of the imperial couple.
Some nights there are banquets for visiting heads of state.
Watanabe is privy to the most mundane details of palace life. At the outset of one interview he fretted about the Empress's affliction with a form of herpes that was causing pain in her shoulder. The imperial chamberlains, of whom the grand chamberlain is the chief, are part of an inner circle of palace bureaucrats, or oku, who work closely with the Japanese royal family. Until the 1970s, when the government decided that morning coats and automobiles would be more appropriate, the chamberlains wore white robes and rode in horse-drawn carriages to pray at the palace shrines. The friction between the oku and the omote has long been fodder for Japan's tabloid press.