kado Ichihara loyally served the Company from 1963 until the day Midtown exploded. A close and personal friend of Kaito Nakamura, it was the Nakamura family that brought a young Akado Ichihara into the Company's fold after discovering he had the miraculous ability to bend the will of others and create mentally dominated puppets that served him like drones serve the queen of an ant colony.
Akado Ichihara would meet the woman who became his wife while working for the Company, Li Zhang-Shou, and together they would bear an unremarkable daughter that Akado would come to cherish. Only when the Company requested Akado's young daughter for rounds of clinical testing on the Formula did his faith in the organization waver, even if briefly. Loyal to a fauly, Akado subjected his daughter to the Company's testing, turning his baby girl into a being like he through artificial means.
But yet Akado remained stalwart and loyal. The secret of his affiliation with the Company was kept for decades from Hokuto's mother, and it was a burden of secret that he and his daughter eventually shared when Hokuto joined the Company to work by her father's side. Somehow, it was ironic that a father and daughter worked at a "paper company" while the mother ran a book store.
Akado's life changed the day Midtown was destroyed. He was among several Company agents tasked with tracking down and re-capturing Sylar, a mission that had become an obsession after his wife passed away and his daughter abandoned the Company to re-evaluate her life. Akado chose not to stay by his daughter's side when she needed him most, and instead chose a path of obsession with his work, with the mission. His reward should have been death, and the world at large presumes it was.
On the day Midtown was destroyed, Akado Ichihara should have been near ground zero, after having discovered reports of Ted Sprague's death to follow Sylar to Midtown. But fate intervened, a series of inconsequential setbacks; reports of Noah Bennet sighted on the way from Kirby Plaza, reports of shots fired near where Sprague had been killed, the city was devolving into chaos and knowing that Sylar had taken Ted's power, Akado was more obsessed with the hunt rather than securing the safety of his own daughter.
He was watching Midtown when the explosion happened, when the nuclear fire turned to a blinding white flash and took his sight, but far enough away not to be consumed by the blast wave. Bereft of identification and in the chaotic months following the explosion, Akado was cared for as a John Doe at Mt.Sinai Hospital, and the Company had written off Akado as killed in action. In a way, Akado Ichihara did die that day. The Company had failed him, the world had failed him, and he had — worst of all — failed his little girl. His obsession with his job could have resulted in her death, and his impressing the idea of work and duty and responsibility on her is what kept her so distant from her mother when she had fallen ill. He had stolen everything good from Hokuto, in his eyes, and by the time he had recovered from his injuries, an empty casket bearing sympathies for Akado Ichihara had already been put in the ground. Staring at one's own grave is a sobering thing, and it was watching his daughter visit and mourn the man he was made something inside of Akado break.
He left New York, left his daughter he felt he did not deserve behind.
He made his way west, hopping from one "good samaritan" to another, letting that seed of self-loathing and loss of worth fester into something terrible. To Akado Ichihara, the Company was at the root of the failure at Midtown. They could have — should have — stopped that catastrophic loss of life. Akado felt that the Company pursued things incorrectly, handled criminals wrong. Instead, Akado Ichihara turned decades of service with the Company into something else, something brutal, something dark. He became a hunter as he saw fit to be, utilizing dominated subjects to track and kill evolved and non-evolved criminals alike, leaving them responsible for the murders he mentally commanded of them.
It is this disproportionate sense of vigilante justice and a lacking sense of self-worth coupled with the guilt of failing at Midtown and failing his family that has driven Akado to take up this "second chance" at life as a violent one.
