 One benefit of the Kamakura innovations was that their singular practices were readily accessible to anyone, even the uneducated. Over the centuries, the Kamakura New Religions gradually became the most popular forms of Buddhism in Japan. At the same time, the philosophical justifications for those minimalized practices, the metapraxes, were often highly sophisticated and have continued to attract the further reflection of some of the best philosophical minds in Japan over the centuries. For example, some twentieth-century Japanese philosophers found points of contact between Western existential philosophers’ responses to Angst and the medieval Buddhist philosophers’ responses to the anguish of the Degenerate Age.