You see "asian." Asians see Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, etc. And believe it or not, Asian countries generally hate each other more than they hate the US. The Cantonese word for "foreigner" means both "foreign devil" and "Japanese." All others are "foreign devil, not Japanese." The Petronas Towers were finished a month ahead of schedule because the Malaysians gave one tower to a Japanese construction crew and the other to a Korean one. They then gave a 5% bonus to whoever finished first. Fights were common but both teams worked around the clock for six weeks straight to beat the other. So when a Japanese star is cast, you just lost China, Korea, Vietnam and Thailand. Cast a Thai star and you lost Japan, China and Korea. Cast a Chinese star and you lost Japan and Korea, etc.
It's fucked up, but I've seen evidence of it. Race is a whole other thing in Asia. A number of our Chinese friends and colleagues do not seem to be sensitive to racism at all in the way that I am used to. The role of race in Chinese culture is nothing like ours in the US. But, that said, many many Americans, white and black, are terribly racist against Chinese. The US market wouldn't be cool with a Chinese James Bond.
Which is a crying goddamn shame because an ethnic-Chinese Briton furthering The Queen's interests in a newly-repatriated Hong Kong is about the only possible relevant spy story you can tell that directly involves MI-6 as anything other than a tertiary appendage of the CIA/NSA/DIA. For that matter, Goldfinger was originally based on the PRC's Nazi gold-laundering and counterfeiting in Macau, credited by many with getting the nascent nation through the lean times shortly after Mao took over. The more I think about it, the more awesome a Chinese James Bond would be - all the places of far-east intrigue that Bond movies have always loved are all about Chinese interests - Kazakhstan, Thailand, North Korea, Japan, Nigeria... all major spheres of Chinese influence in the past ten years. Cinematic as fuck without even trying. Maybe they can get Keith Carradine to play.