Japanese society in the 1950s and 1960s was filled with anxieties about “the kids these days.” Demobilized soldiers returned home from the Asia-Pacific War addicted to methamphetamine. Children growing up unsupervised in Japan’s firebombed cities dabbled in larceny and gobbled up pornography. Television and cinema offered alluring depictions of sex and violence. Against this backdrop, leading politicians began calling for “more religion” as a solution to Japan’s myriad social problems. Buddhists avidly responded, generating educational treatises and arguing that introducing Buddhist teachings in public schools could help develop a morally upright citizenry. These creative Buddhist attempts to make bad kids good utterly failed, but they spurred some of the most doctrinally innovative Buddhist thinking of the twentieth century.