LISTSERV 15.5 - MEDLIB-L Archives. Elizabeth Vining, Tutor to a Future Emperor, Dies at 97 - Obituary; Biography. Elizabeth Gray Vining, a Quaker schoolteacher who was tutor to the shy, lonely boy who became Emperor Akihito of Japan, died on Saturday at Kendal-at-Longwood, a retirement community in Kennett Square, Pa.
She was 97. The story of Elizabeth Vining's stay in the rigidly enclosed world of the Japanese Imperial Court has some of the romance of Margaret Landon's novel, ''Anna and the King of Siam,'' the tale of Anna Leonowens, who in the 1860's tutored the Crown Prince Chulalongkorn of Siam, as Thailand was known.