Early Life
Watanabe was born in Koide, Niigata. His mother was a school teacher and his father taught calligraphy. Due to a number of moves for his parents' work, he spent his childhood in the villages of Irihirose and Sumon, both now part of the city of Uonuma, and in Takada, now part of the city of Jōetsu. He attended Niigata Prefectural Koide High School, where he was a member of the concert band club, playing trumpet, which he had played since childhood.
After graduation from high school, in 1978 he aimed to enter Musashino Academia Musicae, a conservatory in Tokyo. However, he had never received a formal musical education, and because his father had collapsed when Ken was in junior high school and was unable to work there was difficulty in finding the money for tuition. In part because of these problems, Watanabe gave up entering the conservatory.
Read more about this topic: Ken Watanabe
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“The end of a life is always vivifying.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)