Hey there! My name is
Erin Kubo and just from my name you can probably guess my heritage. I am what
you would call “Hapa” which basically means that I am mixed raced. To be exact
I am half Japanese and half White - which
isn’t as plain and simple as it seems because “White” is a mixture all in
itself - which includes English,
French, German, Lithuanian, and Scot's Irish. I am proud of my heritage because
being hybrid of these two things has introduced many new cultural things that
most people rarely get to experience.
One
of the many things I got into was watching anime. Just this past winter break I
watched a hilarious, outrageous, fun anime called “Summer Wars” with my family.
The plot basically starts when an eleventh-grade math genius named Kenji Koiso who
is asked by a friend named Natsuki to come to her house for a summer job. He
realizes later that he has to pretend to be her fiancé at her grandmother’s 90th
birthday. One night Kenji receives a text message that contains a math problem
which, being a math genius, he just can’t resist solving it. The answer turns
out to be the key to a high jacking of the social networking site called OZ.
This causes a worldwide problem because this site contains most of the world’s
social and business traffic flows. He works with Natsuki’s family to defeat the
program that took over his avatar to terrorize the world and to prove his
innocence. I totally recommend this movie because it is so entertaining. 
The
reason why I even mention this movie is for one the many key points that caught
my attention. Towards the end of the movie one of the main female character’s,
Natsuki, plays the Japanese card game Hanafuda to basically help save the
world. The game looked so cool and fun in the anime that I just had to learn
more about it. What I found out later from my grandfather was that it is a card
game, which is mostly used for gambling, that literally means “Flower Cards”. I
love playing card games so I hope to at least learn the basics of the game and
perhaps the history behind them as well.
