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In renowned 20th-century historian Carol Gluck’s words, the “...long postwar was one consequence of the original sengo [postwar] consciousness that wished and hoped for—although not necessarily believed in or lived—a history that could begin again at noon, August 15, 1945.” Writing in 1993, Gluck describes a notion that remains popular in art historical scholarship to this day—namely, that art (and much else) in Japan began anew following the explosion of the atomic bombs, reinforced by exhibitions and scholarship that privilege artists who were born in the 1930s and came of age in the postwar period. How might the notion of “Transwar art” allow us to challenge this conventional periodization? More than simply identifying continuities or ruptures, the concept of “transwar art” requires that we move beyond the presumed division of pre- and post-war Japan and its analogous binaries, including: fascism/liberalism, militarism/pacifism, and imperial divinity/popular sovereignty. This panel considers transwar continuities of design in the service of commerce and the nation, evaluates the aesthetic and political conversion of major artists, considers the weighty colonial freight and ethnoracial dimensions of transwar artworks, and investigates the influence of “active humanism” from the 1930s to the 1970s.