About 5.5 million Japanese regularly go to saunas, roughly equivalent to the entire population of Finland. (Nikkei news montage/Photo credit: Reuters and AFP/Jiji Press)
HELSINKI — The sauna has always been on Mathias Järnefelt’s mind. But the CEO of Harvia Group doesn’t sneak out of his office on the outskirts of Helsinki to enjoy the Finns’ favourite form of relaxation.
Instead, he studied the raw data on saunas and was told that Japan would be a hot spot for his work on sweat evaporation.