This article examines ideas of the past in the development aid work of one of the oldest Japanese NGOs, the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement (OISCA), derived from a Shinto‐based new religion, and its training courses on sustainable agriculture in Burma/Myanmar. Whereas Japan's official discourses on aid focus on postwar national success, OISCA highlights a sense of national– cultural loss and proposes aid as a form of national renewal by using ideas about Japan's past to “redo” modernity elsewhere. This emphasis on pastness was an effect of OISCA staff asserting that it is a “nonreligious” organization and simply “Japanese.” This article demonstrates how hope for national renewal through development aid generates “redemptive dreams” and enacts a politics of temporality in which Japanese and Burmese aid actors contest over the past as resource for the future and over “Japaneseness” as a universal value, oscillating between oppressive and aspirational possibilities.