It was built in a Ginza bath palace called Tokyo Onsen, in 1956 or 1957, by a man who had just come thirtieth out of thirty-two at the Olympics.

Ujitoshi Konomi shot trap for Japan at the Melbourne Games of 1956. In the athletes' village he saw athletes from other countries using a small hot room. As the Japan Sauna Association's own newspaper tells it, he thought "this is it" and asked a teammate, the wrestler Shozo Sasahara, to look closely at how it was built and advise him. Sasahara won gold that week. Konomi went home and built one.

It was not a Finnish sauna. Steam pipes ran through the walls and the floor. The room reached about 80 degrees, and the floor over the pipes was so hot that you could not go in without hopping, says Makio Nakayama, the association's technical adviser. Its first regulars were athletes from the weight-class sports, sweating down to their weight.

In 1964 the Olympics came to Tokyo, Finnish athletes built their own sauna in the village, and the newspapers noticed. By 1973 a Tokyo health official counted 440 saunas in the city.

Konomi was no simple hero: a 2010 biography of him is titled "Special Service Chief Ujitoshi Konomi", after his wartime work in China, and Tokyo Onsen is also remembered for its massage rooms. This film tells only the sauna's story.

Would you have hopped in?

Sources: SAUNA Shimbun no. 337, Japan Sauna Association (15.8.2004); Makio Nakayama in DIME (25.7.2021); Olympedia, men's trap, Melbourne 1956 (Konomi 30th of 32, 140 points); IOC, "Melbourne 1956: Heidelberg West Olympic Village"; Chuo City tourism correspondents' blog, no. 798.
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