A sauna renaissance in Japan

It may not have been possible to cheer on athletes in the stands at this year’s Olympics and Paralympics, but Tokyo residents can console themselves with another activity: soaking up some heat. Japan is in the throes of a fullblown sauna renaissance.

Last year, nearly 28million Japanese reportedly visited saunas more than once, a pandemic-defying rise compared with the previous year, according to the Japan Sauna Spa Association. Once the terrain of a certain breed of middle-aged men, all things sauna are booming across the spectrum, from trend-triggering hipsters to healthconscious young women.

One key trigger is manga comics, that classic Japanese litmus test of all that’s “in” – in particular, a wildly popular manga comic-turned-television series called Sado (“Way of the Sauna”). Even politicians can’t resist the allure: Hiroki Tomita, the mayor of Ikeda, in western Japan, stepped down earlier this year after controversially installing a sauna in his office.

Hotels are also tapping in. Azumi Setoda, the new modern ryokan

inspired hotel in the Seto Inland Sea, by Adrian Zecha, the founder of Aman Resorts, has a brightly tiled bathhouse and a wood-scented sauna.

A Finnish-style sauna steals the show at Shiroiya Hotel, a new creative venture involving a raft of top-name architects, designers and artists – from Sou Fujimoto to Leandro Erlich – in the small town of Maebashi, in Gunma prefecture. Here, a small grass-covered mound houses not only art-packed rooms and a restaurant by the cult artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, but also a hillside, mountain-view sauna.

But perhaps the most unusual postmodern sauna experience unfolds at “TikTok teamLab Reconnect”, which opened this year in a vast tent in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, fusing the worlds of art and sauna (open until Nov 23). The hip Tokyo collective of “ultra technologists” have dazzled the art world with their immersive digital installations, and their latest venture turns up the heat to a new level, combining their signature digital experiences with hi-tech multicoloured saunas.

The experience taps into the cycle of heat, cold water and rest, which triggers a unique neurological state of sharpened senses, a so-called “sauna trance” dubbed totonou, during which teamLab’s colourful artworks – meditative cycles of blooming flowers, perhaps, or mirrored vertical streams of water that burst into rainbow prisms of shimmering sparkles – are unleashed in all their digital glory.

The colourful teamLab sauna in Tokyo