In "Akuma no Uta, (Devil's Song)" the playwright Keiishi Nagatsuka, 29, seems to ask what we Japanese have learned from defeat in World War II. Leaning heavily on comedy, farce, satire and sometimes tragedy, Nagatsuka's answer -- as one of a generation only able to know about that human catastrophe from indirect information -- is: very little.
The issue here is that a generation was denied the essential information required to be a historically conscious Japanese -- knowledge drawn from family, cultural surroundings, politicians but, especially, the education system -- about Japan's militaristic past and the bureaucratic heirs who have run the country since.
The lost generation here is of course primarily that of the play's writer and director (and one of its actors), though it would probably include many older people and certainly those any younger. In this play Nagatsuka is also decrying postwar Japan's aversion to looking back.