Three weeks after an earthquake and tsunami badly damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, the surrounding area has become a spooky landscape of debris and ghost towns. The government has set up a 12-mile quarantine around the plant called the exclusion zone where radiation levels have been measured at four times the level considered safe for human beings. Whereas thousands of people lived in a dozen villages, only a few bold or obstinate residents remain, despite an order to evacuate. Inside the zone, wreckage from the tsunami remains uncleared, few buildings have electricity, and the threat of a nuclear catastrophe still looms--a prospect that terrifies a nation still scarred by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Photographer Donald Weber defied government orders against entering the exclusion zone and shot these photographs on assignment for NEWSWEEK. The town of Odaka, shown here, sits within the exclusion zone, so there's been no clean-up.