Recursion can involve calls to other functions (two or more functions can recursively call each other), but the real issue here is that Java's syntax is confusing you; think of it like this:

return Blah(this);
and
return Blah(someChild);
instead of
return this.Blah();
and
return someChild.Blah();

Some other Object-Oriented languages do not use the "." notation to denote the instance the method should be called on; rather they use ordinary function-call syntax and pass the instance as one of the arguments (as demonstrated above). It happens to be a much more flexible and powerful way of method-selection (think of several different classes' instances as arguments)

Having said all that, I should point out that your example of recursion is indeed "special", though perhaps not in the way you intended. Your example was in fact "tail-recursion" where the recursive call is the last thing done in the function. From what I've seen, it seems that the Java compiler we have handles "tail-recursion" properly; it can be optimized to the equivalent of a "goto" (or, in other words, iteration).