Cookbook of Mary Ishimoto Watanabe, 1979-1994

Mary Ishimoto Watanabe was born September 29, 1920, in San Jose, California, to Santaro Ishimoto (1883-1938) and Umeyo Taketa Ishimoto (1892-1986), both of whom were born in Japan. She had a brother, Hideo, and a sister, Fumiye (who later changed her name to Carol and became a librarian at Harvard University). Watanabe attended school in San Jose and received a bachelor's degree in chemistry and biology from San Jose State College in 1942. As a result of anti-Japanese sentiment during World War II, the Ishimoto family was forced to live in incarceration camps in California and Wyoming in 1942. In 1943, Watanabe was released through the efforts of the American Friends Service Committee. She enrolled at Radcliffe College and Harvard University for graduate studies, where she earned a masters of arts degree (1944) and PhD (1950) in biology. In 1950, she married Warren H. Watanabe and they moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Watanabe joined the Army Quartermaster Corps. In 1954, she took a Japanese language course at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1961 she joined the university's Asian studies department as a lecturer in Japanese. After teaching for five years, she joined the Pacific Asian Coalition, eventually serving for three years as its president during the 1970s. Until the early 1990s, she spent her time promoting Japanese culture, helping Asian students acquire loans, raising funds for the Japanese House and Garden in Fairmont Park, and collecting Japanese woodcuts, including some she and her husband donated to the Philadelphia Museum. Watanabe died in Philadelphia in 1997.