(Baka)Gaijin or not?

While watching the news on TV last night (forget which station), I learned that three "Japanese" had won a Nobel prize and watched the excited reactions of people when informed during the usual goofy "man-in-the-street" interviews.

Then this morning I read:

An American and two Japanese physicists won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics today...(Washington Post)

and

Two Japanese and an American have won the 2008 Nobel Prize for discoveries in the world of subatomic physics...(Japan Times).

Oh. Maybe they meant ethnicity.