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Re-thinking about the episode after a good night's sleep, I'm starting to think the author was subtly making a statement.
The bit about them speaking in English was extremely clever. We (and the Japanese audience) are so used to bad Engrish in anime that we totally fell for it... and then suddenly there's Taichi who's like "excuse me, but your accent is pretty bad (yours is the worst btw, Taichi xD); isn't Japanese your mother tongue?". That was like, wow. They're actually acknowledging that this isn't real English. And questioning the viewers' perception from the beginning.
Then all-along the episode, the narration is showing us that despite their appearance, they're no different than anyone else:
- they speak Japanese without any kind of weird accent (how many foreigner-looking anime character can claim that?)
- like a lot of characters in this show, they're looking for something more than a simple game in karuta
- parallelism is drawn between some of them and the Mizusawa team: Chihaya remarking that Anthony is placing his cards the same way she did when she was younger, Rachel's love for the poems which is like Kana's approach to karuta, etc.
- Anthony's backstory is yet another story of alienation, like so many other characters in this show; this brings them closer together, shows that they're no different than any other karuta player we know
It's not their looking like foreigners that really makes them different than the Mizusawa team, it's them being beginners at competitive karuta - as evidenced by the puzzling over their card placement and Nishida's thoughts about their play style. And look how the Mizusawa team suddenly started playing seriously when they both realized that and started seeing their similarity; like Arata to Chihaya so long ago, and Chihaya with Kana and Tsutomu, they're conveying their love of competitive karuta to beginners with an all-out, no mercy match (see the contrast with the guy Sumire played against in the Regionals).
Each team learned something from the other: the freedom that the amateur world provides, and the beauty of competition.
Then at the same time we have everyone react weirdly to them, even offensively (Tsukuba in particular), and missing the point (still saying "foreigners" when they've explained that they're second-generation Japanese; a stupid mindset that is persistent in any culture, even non-homogeneous ones, I might add), and it's done very, very realistically.
But the contrast with the narration makes it clear that the joke is on them, and that the show is criticizing the Japanese society's ignorance when dealing with foreigners or foreign-looking people. It's especially telling with Tsukuba: it's the typical knee-jerk "big black people are scary" reaction, but I don't think we're meant to agree with him (as ~BC~ said, the guy doesn't look threatening at all, so it's all in his mind).
I think the author is aware of the insidious xenophobia in Japanese society toward foreigners and, in this case in particular, second-generation Japanese, and is showing the viewer that no, really, they're no different than other Japanese, and your irrational fear is silly.
As for their message in English at the end, I think it was a way to show their respect. Like, "you went out of your way to do something typically Japanese when it might not have been easy from your background, now it's our turn to make the effort to cross cultures and language". Small gesture to show their support to other atypical players (it reminded me how Chihaya interrupted the people who were talking bad about Ririka by yelling "chocolate!!"). It's also a big contrast to the way Anthony's classmates reacted to his getting into karuta.
And in the end, really, it's all about welcoming beginners to the world of competition.
I don't know how long this story'll last, but if they do another year, I'm pretty hyped for the eventual rematch x)
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