When U.S. officials occupied Japan at the end of World War II, they declared that the defeated country lacked religious freedom. Their story was politically expedient, but it masked an inconvenient history. Japanese politicians had guaranteed religious freedom in an 1889 constitution, and for decades clerics had engaged in fierce debates about the meaning and scope of that religious freedom clause. Yet even as Buddhists in Japan came to understand religious freedom as a handy tool for securing privileges while excluding “foreign” religions like Christianity, ethnically Japanese Buddhists living in the U.S. Territory of Hawai`i repeatedly tried and failed to get the U.S. guarantee of religious freedom to work for them. These Japanese Americans won a landmark Supreme Court case in 1927 that upheld the right of parents to educate their children at voluntary Buddhist-operated schools (Farrington v. Tokushige), but the racist structures of U.S. society and the associated presupposition that Buddhism was not a real religion made the straightforward legal tactic of appealing to religious freedom unavailable to them. Drawing on primary sources in both Japanese and English such as personal memoirs, bombastic speeches, fiery screeds, dry legal proceedings, staid government reports, and arresting images, I uncover several hitherto overlooked Buddhist theories of religious freedom. Along the way, I show that religious freedom is never simply present or absent in any country, nor indeed has “it” ever been just one thing in any time or place.