"Asian" as a continental term is not a very meaningful category -unlike with Europe, there is no single racial group, and relatively little social and cultural uniformity, common history etc by comparison as well. In fact, "western Asia" also includes the Middle East in the geographic sense but I accept the convention that "Asia" refers to the region East of Iran.
Now I have not read all that much into the history of that continent but it seems to me that there are several meaningful groups if we try to categorize its peoples: first, there are the "East Asians" consisting of two distinct groups, namely the North East Asians of Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan, and the South East Asians (e.g. Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines etc).
Another group are the Central Asians: this comprises the "stan" countries barring Afghanistan and Pakistan, i.e. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and the others. Probably relatively little known outside Russia considering that they were effectively absorbed by the Russian empire and later became part of the Soviet Union, and only became independent states some few decades ago.
Then there is the familiar South Asian group of Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Afghanistan is somewhat anomalous because it is at the boundary of several regions and is highly ethnically diverse but I would put it here since the dominant group there, the Pathans, seem to have closest affinity to Pakistan (they also inhabit the North-West region of that country). The same goes for Nepal though the Nepalese have a far greater affinity to China than Afghanistan does to Central Asia.
PS SkyFall is correct, here we use the term "Oriental" for the East Asians and "Asian" for the South Asians.
