David Guttenfelder / AP

Tayo Kitamura, 40, kneels in the street to caress and talk to the wrapped body of her mother Kuniko Kitamura, 69, after Japanese firemen discovered the dead woman inside the ruins of her home in Onagawa, northeastern Japan Saturday, March 19.

AP photojournalist David Guttenfelder shares his experience covering the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

I saw Tayo Kitamura picking through rubble in the leveled town of Onagawa. She was looking for her mother who'd been missing since the earthquake and tsunami struck. She told some Japanese firemen searching the area that she had a gut feeling her mother was buried in a house nearby. Her mother's house had mostly vanished, but she recognized part of the outer wall and some of her family belongings lying in a neighbor's yard. The firemen started digging, removing piles of wood and sea fish. They finally found a body of a woman. Everyone went silent.

Two firemen whispered to one another. They seemed to be talking about how to break the news. They carried the body to the road and held up a sheet while Kitamura checked. When she stepped away she turned to me and said, very stoically, "Yes, that's her." The firemen left Kitamura to be alone. She kneeled and began to caress her dead mother through the blue plastic, speaking to her in a whisper as she wept.

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David Guttenfelder / AP

Japanese military unload food aid from a U.S. helicopter, that was dispatched from the the USS George Washington, as it lands near a shelter in the earthquake and tsunami-hit town of Minamisanriku, Friday, March 18.

AP photojournalist David Guttenfelder shares his experience covering the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

I was inside a shelter on a hill above the leveled city of Minamisanriku. I heard a helicopter from the USS Ronald Reagan approaching outside. Several Japanese troops and I ran out into a muddy field where it landed. One of the U.S. crew members pantomimed to the Japanese that there were boxes of food on board and they began lifting cans of beans, dried foods, and powdered milk and stacking them outside. An American crew member approached me and, shouting over the thump of the chopper blades, he asked "Do you speak English? What do these people need? Medicine? Food?' I'd just arrived and didn't know. I glanced inside the makeshift hospital and saw they had medicine, so I shouted back that I guessed they needed food. After that, I found a Japanese soldier and a medic and told them to make a list of what they needed and give it to the chopper when they came back. They wrote on a Post-it note that they needed more food and especially cooking and heating gas. An hour later, the scene replayed. We heard another chopper coming in, this time from the USS George Washington. After food was unloaded, a crew member came up to me and shouted "Do you speak English? What do these people need?"

David Guttenfelder / AP

A Japanese soldier sweeps a street in the earthquake and tsunami-hit town of Minamisanriku, Friday, March 18, where his unit planned to begin placing people's personal items to sort.

 AP photojournalist David Guttenfelder shares his experience covering the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Some Japanese soldiers were waiting for equipment to finish clearing a field for use as a staging ground, when one of them began to busy himself by sweeping the road with a tiny broom. He worked on this for at least an hour and cleared only a tiny patch of the road, which is blocked, in the background, by a train engine. The destruction of Minamisanriku is so total, I wondered why this soldier would do something that seemed beyond futile. I think when people feel helpless they will sometimes try anything, no matter how pointless, just to feel they are doing something.

David Guttenfelder / AP

Two elderly Japanese women and a pet dog pass by a ship that washed into their neighborhood by the tsunami as they try to make their way to search for their destroyed home in the leveled city of Kesennuma, in northeastern Japan, Thursday March 17.

AP photojournalist David Guttenfelder shares his experience covering the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

When we drove into the town of Kesennuma, Japan, we saw a massive ship and my AP colleague said, “That must be the port.” But we were far from the ocean and it just didn’t add up. As it turned out, the tsunami had deposited this ship in the middle of a suburban intersection, about 50 yards from a destroyed 7-Eleven. It was so absurdly out of context. Residents searching for whatever remained of their homes and possessions — including an elderly woman with a puppy peeking out from her backpack — stopped and stared in disbelief at the shipwreck in their front yards. I stared too, trying to make a picture that would show the scale of the ship and the strangeness of it all.

David Guttenfelder / AP

A Japanese survivor of the earthquake and tsunami rides his bicycle through the leveled city of Minamisanriku, in northeastern Japan, Tuesday March 15, 2011.

AP photojournalist David Guttenfelder shares his experience covering the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

We’d all covered earthquakes and wars and hurricanes before. But when some fellow AP staffers and I entered the cove at the town of Minamisanriku, we gasped out loud in the car. None of us had ever seen such complete devastation. From the top of a hill, I watched storm clouds over the ocean and saw a single bicyclist pedaling along a trail that cut through the leveled landscape. Rescuers with hooked sticks worked in the ruins, occasionally finding soaked corpses in the stairwells of gutted homes. I realized that each dead person I have seen since I got here was very elderly — I assume they were too old, too frail or too alone to get to higher ground when the tsunami warning sirens stared wailing.

-David Guttenfelder