Back to "Asian" vs "Oriental"
Well in all actuality, if you want to get technically specific, to call someone "Asian" could be just as offensive as "Oriental" in the broad sense of the term. How about if you ran into somebody from Nepal, or Russia, or Khazakstan would you call them Asian? No, probably not. But why not? Their country is within the continent of Asia (see below, click attachment if pic doesn't show). So based on that, calling a person of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc. descent "Asian" is categorizing an even broader spectrum of cultures and races of people than "Oriental." However, in societal terms, "Oriental" has become a derogatory reference in some people's opinions, and "Asian" has become the acceptable term, and has again lumped a bunch of people together and, well, forgot a whole hell of a lot of other cultures in its generalization. What about "White" people? I'm German, which is technically in Europe so why aren't I called "European", hell, I'd like to be called European over White, but alas, I was born in America, so I'm "White".
Hrrrmmm, so what do we call each other? I think we'd be a lot better off if people would become a little more educated as to whom their speaking to, first of all. It's ok to be sensitive to the audience you're addressing, especially if it's in a public forum such as this. But being strictly PC is not always possible either... and well, sometimes you come off as a dumbass anyway. In this case though, I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt in that he was using "japs" as an abbreviation and was so enthusiastic about his find that he HAD to get it to us ASAP so we could revel in the Transformer creations (which are pretty sweet, BTW, yet slightly disturbing in the same vein...) and share our opinions that his fingers just could not type fast enough and therefore cut off the last part of "Japanese".

The "wtf are they smoking" part, though, can be taken in context w/"japs" and therefore taken derogatorily. Now if he'd been like "these ******* japs are whack, man look at this stupid s*** they cooked up, peetards" errr, then yeah, I'D be pissed too because that's just disrespectful. But what if he'd said, "look at this tight Japanese s***, it's like transformers! check it

", would this discussion have been the same?
Sorry for the long post.