Talk about awkward timing.

As President Barack Obama prepares to visit Japan later this week, a top official in Japan’s new ruling party said Christianity was “exclusive and self-righteous” and that U.S. and European societies with a Christian background are “stuck at an impasse.”

Ichiro Ozawa, secretary general of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan and one of the country’s most powerful political figures, talked about religion after meeting with the head of the Japan Buddhist Federation. “U.S. and European societies, civilizations with an exclusive Christian background, are now stuck at an impasse,” the Asahi Shimbun newspaper quoted him as saying. Other newspapers also quoted him as saying to reporters that Christianity was “extremely exclusive and a self-righteous religion.”

Ozawa, who is credited with devising a campaign strategy that helped the DPJ sweep to power and unseat the Liberal Democratic Party for the first time in nearly six decades, also said that Islam was “exclusive too, but less so than Christianity.” Christians are a small minority in Japan, and the country has few Muslims.

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