Same World, Different Planet

Hiroko and her husband Daisuke came to visit on Sunday. It's hard to believe it's been ten years since Hiroko and I worked together at Tokorozawa Junior High School. She was the school nurse, and I was the ALT; that's Assistant Language Teacher, for those who have never taugh English in Japan. We were kind of thrown together as the youngest members of the staff. And it didn't take me long to realize what the rebellious kids in the school had already known for a long time: Hiroko's "Health Room" was a great place to hang out.
When a person claims to "feel sick," how can you deny them? Only that person knows the condition of their internals. Question the claim, forbid a trip to the Health Room, and find out how sick they really were when they vomit on you...this never actually happened to me, thankfully. But it explains how lots of students who were just fine but wanted to escape from class for one reason or another were able to take refuge in the Health Room.
Hiroko was good in the Health Room though. It never got too out of control, and those who weren't really sick were found out relatively quickly and sent on back to where they came from. As a fellow teacher, I was exempt from such scrutiny, so when I had a free period (which was often), I would regularly let my time pass with Hiroko in her room. It's hard--make that impossible--for me to remember the specifics of most of the conversations we had. But I do know that she taught me quite a lot of Japanese, as that's the language we were chatting in. In those days I was studying for the Japanese Proficiency Test, and when she was available she was always willing to explain the words and grammar I just couldn't quite grasp.
So last Saturday, Hiroko, who is 9 months pregnant, came here with her husband Daisuke, who is also a teacher. They live in the next prefecture north of Tokyo, Saitama. A couple of geographical equivalents: this is like visitors coming from Joliet to visit Evanston (for IL) or from Salem to Portland (OR) or from San Bernardino to La Mirada (CA)...you get the idea.
For Hiroko and Daisuke, the physical distance was not as impactful as the ideological distance. My prose is a little too lofty even for me, here, but what I think I mean is, they were like fish out of water!
I'm not really "cool" enough to live here, either, truth be told. But I was a little surprised to hear them saying things like "we feel like we're not in Japan anymore!" and "coming here is like traveling overseas!". There are a lot of embassies around here, and therefore a bigger concentration of foreigners than Hiroko and Daisuke will find in their neighborhood (number of "gaijin (non-Japanese people)". And there are a lot of shops selling couture and other things I can't pronounce or pay for. But I can promise them that just as Roppongi is a world away from Roppongi, Roppongi is not quite as near to overseas as they might think. Then again, how do I quite know where I am when I'm sitting in a dark room waiting for Koji to go to sleep?!