All Japan was jumping. Another year had rolled around, and the annual New Year poetry contest results were proclaimed. This year the subject of the 31-syllable waka competition was "Light,'' a topic chosen by Emperor Hirohito himself. There were more than 23,000 entrants, the most ever, and the 15 winners (Japan's royalty is excluded) included a blind lady who submitted her poem in Braille, and a humble lady day laborer (of a class known to Japanese as anko, which is, in turn, a fish that is mostly mouth and stomach). The Emperor's waka (which always seems to lose a certain something in translation) went:
My hope is that the sun,
Rising in brilliance in the morning,
Shall cast its light unhindered
Over all the world,
But the waka that aroused the most popular interest was one submitted by pretty Crown Princess Michiko, 25, who is about to don the traditional pregnancy belt. Her entry:
As I wait for spring
That is full of light and hope,
Deep within my heart
I become attached to earth
Which enfolds the source of life.
Cried a court chamberlain, himself a red-hot waka whiz: "Michiko employed eighth-century Manyoshu-style words in two places in her poem—making it difficult even for experts to understand. Prodigious!"
Michigan's durable (six terms) Democratic Governor G. Mennen ("Soapy") Williams doffed his eternal bow tie, donned vestments for a rather surprising role. His Sabbath assignment: lay reader in Lansing's St. Paul's Episcopal Church. His text: Isaiah 60: 1-9; Matthew 2: 1-12.
When Heiress Gamble Benedict, 19 last week, was a little girl, her mother committed suicide. Gamble's father, Vermont Psychiatrist J. Douglas Sharpe, later lost custody of Gamble and her brother Douglas, who then fell under the stern care of their maternal grandmother, Manhattan Dowager Katharine Geddes ("Grammy") Benedict, now 75. Did Gamble feel that Grammy gave her more lectures than love? So it seemed last week, which found Gamble in Paris with Rumanian-born Andrei Porumbeanu, 34, a U.S. Air Force veteran, who had met Gamble at a Manhattan party. The two had eloped, right after Gamble's flossy debut party, on a slow boat to Antwerp. Trouble was that Porumbeanu was married, with a wife and ten-year-old daughter back in Manhattan. The couple announced in Paris that they would be wed as soon as Andrei's divorce could be got. Was Andrei merely a fortune-hunting cad on the make for Gamble's Remington-typewriter legacy? It was easy to draw that conclusion, but, oddly enough, many of Gamble Benedict's good friends, while admitting that the romance is a bit unwieldy at the moment, believe that it may be true love. Interestingly. Brother Douglas, 21, eloped a couple of years ago at a tender age—but Grammy had that match annulled promptly.