Sudden devastation struck Japan twice on March 11, 2011, when an 8.9-magnitude earthquake sent a wall of water toward Japan’s helpless northern coastal cities and villages. Together, the two claimed the lives of more than 19,000 people, demolishing fishing villages and businesses, scrubbing out households and livelihoods, and leaving destruction in their wake. The buckling of earth and sea also rattled the Fukushima nuclear plant, precipitating one of the gravest nuclear crises in decades. Q. Sakamaki photographed the bleak disaster zone on assignment for Newsweek last year, and this year he returned. As the anniversary of the catastrophe approached, Sakamaki’s lens found that, while the overturned cars and other detritus have been mostly removed from the streets, the nation’s wounds are still apparent in the swaths of scoured ground where rebuilding has yet to begin, and in the temporary settlements where thousands of Japanese shivered through the winter. For them, as for the 80,000 people driven away by radiation from the Fukushima plant, the future still waits. Above, rubble has been cleared from a roadway near Arahama, Sendai.