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.

While a full complement of European royalty and all manner of aristocrats looked on, Lady Pamela Mountbatten, 30, younger daughter of Britain's Admiral of the Fleet Earl Mountbatten, was married to Commoner David Hicks, one of Mayfair's classiest interior decorators. During the ceremony, a blizzard raged outside old Romsey Abbey in Hampshire. Because of her pregnancy, Queen Elizabeth II was not there, but her most charming proxy was doubtless little Princess Anne, 9, buffered from the very cold weather with a flannelette-lined bridesmaid's gown. At the reception, Anne, feeling quite grown up, sipped ginger ale from a bubbly glass while solemnly watching her elders downing the real thing.

Confronted with a dilemma, Evangelist Billy Graham, vacationing at Jamaica's fashionable Round Hill resort, faced it squarely. Sizzling with a bad case of sunburn, he was advised that the best remedy is whisky. But Billy decided against a Scotch skin rub: "Can you imagine what the hotel servants would think if they came into my room and found me reeking of whisky? Why, it would be all over the hotel that Billy Graham was drunk!"

Popping off in Detroit during a pre-Broadway tour of A Thurber Carnival, Humorist James Thurber, 65, got to talking to local newsmen about history and women. Said he: "Women are taking over the world because they are blandly unconcerned about history. I once sat next to a woman who asked, 'Why did we have to purchase Louisiana, when we got all the other states free?' I explained to her that Louisiana was owned by two women --Louise and Anna Wilmot--and that they sold it to General Winfield Scott, provided he'd name it after them. This was called the Wilmot Proviso, and his closing of the deal was the Dred Scott decision. She answered, 'Never mind the details! Why did we let them talk us into it at all?' "

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