Sheesh, why can't they be specific. Is he Japanese? Is he Indonesian? Israeli? Diego Garcian? Saudi? Vietnamese? Asia is a large place.
This bothers me too. The British and Australians do this all the time. They know it waters down the news. I always used to wonder why the British white youths were fighting with Asians who I assumed were Indians. Now I know it was the Pakistanis.
You touched on something I remembered from over a decade ago. We used to know a young French woman who had come here to the US. She was from Lyon, and would complain bitterly to me about all the crime that was happening in her town, committed by "immigrants".
I, being totally uninformed that long ago about the "religion of peace" didn't realize that she was talking about France's now extremely high crime problem from their ME immigrants. I assumed she was an anti-immigrant xenophobe or something of that sort.
How wrong I was about her...