Between the Emergency and the Everyday

Abstract This article tells the history of Miyagi Prefecture’s tsunami memorial halls, built following the 1933 Shōwa-Sarniku earthquake and tsunami, to grapple with the challenges of using memorials and collective memory to build resilience to future and recurring threats. The article takes the halls themselves as its main protagonists, following their memorial life cycles from their early conception, to their first lives as tsunami memorial halls, to their varied second lives after being repurposed, and finally to their steady destruction. Using insights from environmental history, memory studies, and critical disaster studies, the piece argues that the rise and fall of the tsunami memorial halls resulted from the incommensurability of human and geological timescales. It shows how the memory of and resilience to long-term seismic threats, which the halls tried to promote, gave way to a focus on everyday concerns at the human scale. These everyday concerns, caused by long-standing socioeconomic struggles and exacerbated in wartime and postwar Japan, led communities to shift the kinds of resilience they pursued with the halls. The article presents the memorial halls as a cautionary tale for those who use memory as a tool of resilience, arguing memorials themselves need to be made resilient to changing social and environmental conditions over deep time scales.