Obama in Japan, mulling Afghanistan

This just in from the AP news service:

TOKYO – President Barack Obama aims Friday to shore up relations with a new Japanese government vowing to be more assertive with its U.S. ally, even as he grapples with sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

The good news is that he could be trying to get input from the Japanese, who are important allies of the United States.

The bad news is that the Japanese will not know much. Power behind the throne (very Japanese way of doing things) Ozawa recently said, according to the Japan Times:

Christianity "is an exclusive, self-righteous religion. Western society, whose background is Christianity, has been stuck in a dead end,"

As you can probably imagine, Mr. Ozawa knows even less about Islam than he does about Christianity.

This blog doesn't object to the impolitic nature of his remarks, but it does reject their incorrectness. Bigotry is bigotry, whether directed against Islam, Judaism, Buddhism or Christianity. The really sad part is that bigoted remarks about other peoples are not considered a problem in Japan. When is Japan going to take its international responsibilities seriously enough to learn something about the outside world besides technology and economics?