How should we remember a disaster? This dissertation explores how this question was answered in modern Japan in the wake of four earthquake and tsunami disaster events across the 20th and 21st centuries by examining disaster memorial sites and practices. In this examination of disaster memorials, I weave together two important aspects of life, and areas of academic study, on the Japanese archipelago: disaster and memory. In linking disaster and memory, I draw together the fields of environmental history, environmental humanities, disaster studies, and memory studies to further understanding about Japan’s place in global history.I argue that Japanese disaster memorials were important sites where Japanese sought to understand themselves, their environment, and their place in the globalizing world of the 20th and 21st centuries. I show that modern Japanese disaster memorials developed in relation to the intertwined currents of local and global memory culture. This also allows me to make a novel intervention in the field of memory studies. The existing scholarship on memorials and memorialization has prioritized the importance of war memorials and memorials to human-perpetuated atrocities. By analyzing disaster memorials in modern Japan built following seismic catastrophes I intervene in this largely war and atrocity-centric field in two ways. First, I decenter war and atrocity memorials as well as their related concerns in memory studies. Whereas memorials to victims of human violence often center human-to-human relationships like comrade and enemy, enslaver and enslaved, perpetrator and victim, disaster memorials are often articulated as spaces where humans grapple with their relationship to their past, present, and future environmental hazards. Second, I show that disaster memorials in modern Japan exist in the larger circulation of a global memory culture dominated by war and atrocity memorialization. This intervention disabuses us of the notion that disaster memorialization is somehow a manifestation of Nihonjinron, or Japanese uniqueness. Instead, I show disaster memorials in Japan are an expression of a complicated web made up of the realities of the archipelago’s environment, how the environment’s hazards can affect vulnerable populations on the islands, and how survivors of disasters make use of both local and global memory cultures to cope with those hazards. In addition to the weaving together of environmental history and memory studies, I make a practical intervention in the field of history through my study of modern Japanese disaster memorials. In other words, I believe the stakes of this dissertation are more than historiographical. I argue that the case studies presented here offer models and lessons for how the modern memorial form can be mobilized in response to the most pressing disaster of our time: climate change.