A colleague in Berkeley told me that the reason that X invited me to Japan was that I was one of the few people who had been kind to him when he visited Berkeley.
The only contact I had had with X was several years earlier, when I sat next to him at a dinner party at the mathematician Robert Coleman's house. I racked my brain to try to remember how I had been nice to X. Here's my recollection.
X's English wasn't very good, and it was a struggle for people to communicate with him over a noisy dinner table, so I was the one who was left to talk with him. After X and I had conversed for awhile, I looked up and noticed that most of our dinner companions were no longer in the dining room. X and I were starting to get hungry, so I told him I'd see what was happening in the kitchen.
Robert, who had multiple sclerosis, was fortunate to have many helpful friends who looked out for him. When I entered the kitchen I saw Robert in his wheelchair, and about half a dozen of his friends. The friends had just taken a very large salmon out of the oven and were trying to slide it onto a serving tray. I watched as the salmon slid off the pan, onto Robert's kitchen floor. Definitely a case of too many cooks.
Out of curiosity I stuck around long enough to see Robert's resourceful friends scrounging up spoons and forks, and using them to shovel bits of salmon onto the serving tray.
I went back to the dining room, sat down, turned to X, and quietly but firmly said, "Don't eat the salmon."
Several years later, X invited me to visit his university in Tokyo. I had a wonderful stay in Japan; I loved the country and the food, and people were very nice to me.
Especially kind and helpful was the graduate student whom X assigned to take care of me. He traveled with me when I gave talks at other universities or went sightseeing, sometimes bringing along a grad student friend of his. The point was to make sure I didn't get lost, given that I couldn't read the signs or the subway map. However, it turned out that I had both a good sense of direction, and adequate pattern-matching skills.
"We take this train," said one of my handlers.
"But isn't it going in the wrong direction?" I said, showing them the names on the map.
At first they ignored me, thinking I couldn't possibly know better than they did about Japanese trains. But eventually they were impressed with me, after I saved us from going the wrong way a couple of times.
I noticed that mathematicians of all ages called me Alice-san. "Shouldn't it be Silverberg-san?" I asked. "After all, they've just met me. Are they using my first name because I'm female? Or do they just not know which name is my surname?" My colleagues assured me it wasn't sexism, it was just that Silverberg is too hard to pronounce. I agree that it's probably a mouthful for Japanese speakers.
One day, the grad student confided the reason he was chosen to look after me. "X told me that I should be the one to do it, since I'm good with animals and children."
That took a moment to sink in.
I wondered whether I should have pushed back more when people called me Alice-san.
I had brought with me a book that listed lots of free things to do in Tokyo, and introduced my grad student assistants to a few places they hadn't known about. They were suitably impressed by my resourcefulness. I gifted them the book when I left. But I was much more the beneficiary of the kindness of my Japanese friends, than the benefactor.
I hadn't thought that I was especially kind to X. At Robert's dinner party, I was just behaving the way I thought anyone would. It seems it does pay to welcome visitors and be polite to them, even if the kindness is merely the advice "Don't eat the salmon."