Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(US) insane, crazy; usu. as go asiatic v., to go crazy; the primary inference is of substituting ‘Asian’ morals for those of the white West.

1928		Philippine Mag. 136/2: All these growls are enough to make a man ‘go Asiatic’ [...] One who has looked upon the wine when it is red just a little too often, and as a result is spending his time brushing red ants off the counter pane, has gone ‘Asiatic’.
1948		Heggen & Logan Mister Roberts I i: We gotta get these guys ashore! They’re going Asiatic!
1953		L. Uris Battle Cry (1964) 136: I think Mac is going Asiatic on us.
1969		J. Crumley One to Count Cadence (1987) 42: They were, to a man, crazy. They called it ‘going Asiatic’. [Ibid.] 154: Maybe I’m going Asiatic like the rest of you bastards.
1977		J. Langone Life at the Bottom 197: The best thing we did, though, was get out there with nothin’ on [...] and you’d stand there, wavin’ bottles of booze, and they’d just about shit, think we’d all gone Asiatic.
1989		Hackworth & Sherman About Face (1991) 154: He jokingly suggested that I’d ‘gone Asiatic.’.
1999		N. Stephenson Cryptonomicon 39: What the hell is wrong with those Marines? [...] Those poor bastards have gone Asiatic.
2002		S. O’Brien Blackrobe in Blue 181: A concern of some bishops when allowing their men to enlist in the services was that they might ‘go Asiatic’ if they were far away from their diocese.