History
The movement was founded by Shoko Asahara in his one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo's Shibuya ward in 1984, starting off as a yoga and meditation class known as Aum Shinsen no Kai (オウム神仙の会, "Aum club of gods and hermits"?) and steadily grew in the following years. It gained the official status as a religious organization in 1989. It attracted such a considerable number of young graduates from Japan's elite universities that it was dubbed a "religion for the elite".
Read more about this topic: Aum Shinrikyo
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