The man behind an unprecedented string of heinous crimes in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s who was executed Friday grew up partially blind and had to struggle with various setbacks in his childhood in aspiring to make something of his life.
Formerly an acupuncturist, Shoko Asahara, who was 63, founded a new religious sect, AUM Shinrikyo, and eventually became its revered guru. The group attracted tens of thousands of followers in Japan, including many highly educated young people, and branched out overseas into countries including Russia.
Asahara, whose real name was Chizuo Matsumoto, was born in Kumamoto Prefecture in March 1955 as one of seven children in a financially-strapped family.
Almost blind in his left eye and weak-sighted in his right, Asahara was sent to a prefectural school for the blind in Kumamoto. He was seen as smart, but was not popular enough to take any leadership roles in sports or student bodies.
He once took the entrance examination for the University of Tokyo but failed. After leaving school, he opened a pharmacy in Chiba Prefecture but was arrested in 1982 for selling unauthorized medicines. He married in 1978 and fathered six children.
In 1984, he launched the cult's predecessor group, AUM Shinsen no Kai, which opened a yoga school. Three years later, it was renamed AUM Shinrikyo.
Many young followers severed ties with their families and started living communally in AUM facilities, donating their cash and belongings to Asahara. Educated youths with expertise in science also filled AUM's top ranks.
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Asahara's emergence came at a time when there was a boom in new religions in Japan in the 1980s and many young people felt alienated by the culture of consumerism and success generated during the country's asset-inflated bubble economy years.
"Those who sought spiritual happiness, instead of the material abundance (seen) during the bubble economy period in the late 1980s, were drawn to AUM," Hiromi Shimada, a scholar of religion who researched AUM extensively, said in a speech in 2015.
The teachings were influenced by Buddhism and Hinduism, and the group promoted extrasensory experiences as a path to enlightenment. Former followers would later say they were given hallucinogens such as LSD as part of religious practice.
With his beard and long hair, Asahara projected himself as a "savior," claiming to have achieved enlightenment from an ascetic experience in the Himalayas, and told his followers he was the reincarnation of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and regeneration.
The self-styled guru, who also said he could teach levitation and telepathy, taught that the world would end in Armageddon and promised to lead his followers to salvation.
"World War III will certainly occur. I will stake my religious life on that," he said in a lecture in 1993.
Asahara dipped into politics, running unsuccessfully with top members of AUM Shinrikyo in the 1990 general election for the House of Representatives. Prosecutors believe this electoral defeat is what spurred Asahara to begin plotting wholesale murder of members of the public in revenge. Mass production of sarin nerve gas also gained traction at this time.
In a sign of what prosecutors said was Asahara's hunger for power and control, AUM, a legally registered religious organization, structured itself along the lines of the government, with its own "agencies" and "ministries."
AUM also had a teaching that condoned murder as a path to salvation.
Even after his arrest in May 1995 -- two months after the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system -- Asahara continued to speak in religious rhetoric, saying a miracle would happen and that he would not have to stand trial. But the miracle he spoke of never occurred, and his trial started in April 1996.
Halfway through the proceedings at the Tokyo District Court, which last almost eight years, Asahara fell silent, leaving AUM's crimes mostly unexplained by its leader.
Asahara was sentenced to death in 2004.
