EYEWITNESS: Sauna, schmoozing, and the four-inch rule

The Diplomatic Finnish Sauna Society of DC strips for action

print this

By Pekka Mykkänen in Washington DC
     
      I have this anecdote about nudity, and Kari Mokko has a "four-inch rule".
      We'll start with the anecdote, I think. More on Mokko and his rule later.
      A female American colleague could not and would not believe I had been to sauna with Marcus Brauchli.
      She giggled and wriggled and asked the question in any number of roundabout ways before I finally twigged that what she wanted to know was whether we had been in sauna together, you know, completely naked.
      Had I really seen one of the most influential men in the United States' media firmament in his birthday suit?
      Giggle-giggle.
     
Marcus Brauchli has been executive editor of the Washington Post, the capital's #1 newspaper, since September 2008, and before that he was managing editor of the Wall Street Journal.
      The Post - Brauchli's paper - trailed a piece on its front page last Thursday about a strange Washington phenomenon known as "The Diplomatic Finnish Sauna Society of D.C."
      What is this subversive organisation?
      It is an unofficial networking club founded by Kari Mokko, the Finnish Embassy's current press secretary and erstwhile Finnish Broadcasting Company TV-reporter, and it came into being more or less by accident.
     
In the spring of 2008, Mokko invited a bunch of American journalists to the embassy's sauna to watch an NHL game on the big screen, throw some water on the stones in the sauna, and chill out with a few beers.
      It was a very convivial evening, everyone had a great time, word spread, more people showed up for sauna and beers, Mokko printed off some laminated diplomas for those who withstood the heat (set at 190°F or around 88°C, so not exactly extreme sauna sport by local Finnish standards), and the news spread still further afield...
     
At this point Mokko's steam-powered monster threatened to go ballistic.
      Now he is having trouble coping with the flood of bathers.
      A couple of hundred people have turned up for sessions, and the DFS Society even has a Facebook page with 93 "friends" or members on it.
      The net has grown wider with time, as journalists have been joined in the embassy's handsome basement sauna suite by movers and shakers from Capitol Hill, the White House, the Department of State and Department of Defence, by lobbyists, and by other operatives that keep D.C. humming, such that the Washington Post wrote enthusiastically of "a monthly Power Schvitz for the policy staffers behind Washington's power players - and the journalists who cover them."
     
The sauna nights are held once every four weeks on Fridays.
      Invited guests are usually eager to wind down after a heavy working week at the political coal-face, so Mokko is smart enough not to pitch them the full Powerpoint extravaganza on the joys of the pine & lakes welfare state system or the latest triumphs of Finnish design.
      Still, rather as Mokko believed might happen, his guests have begun one way and another to get interested in Finland.
      There have been chats with some bathers over Finland's aspirations to get onto the UN Security Council as a non-permanent member, on the architecture of the new embassy building [the work of Finnish architects Mikko Heikkinen and Markku Komonen, and erected on a site on Massachusetts Avenue in 1994], and on Finnish environmental expertise.
     
There have even been some concrete developments.
      When Finland's Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Stubb was interviewed recently by several leading U.S. news outlets, such as Newsweek, the news agency AP, or the bimonthly magazine Foreign Policy, all the interviewers were members of the Sauna Society.
      When Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen met last September with the Senate Majority Leader, Democrat Harry Reid from Nevada, and his Republican colleague Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the meetings were fixed up in half an hour by an American member of Kari Mokko's club.
      "Sauna diplomacy worked during the Soviet era, and it seems to work here, too", says Mokko.
     
Unlike the Russians of yore, Americans are rather careful in their use of alcohol when going to the sauna.
      Some of them may also have problems - at least at first - with the nudity side of things.
      The embassy guests wrap a towel around themselves when they go into the steam-room.
      It hardly needs to be said that men and women bathe separately.
      Some members turn up to the Friday sessions and do not actually go to sauna.
     
But you are probably wondering about the four-inch rule.
      It derives from what happens when Mokko tells his American acquaintances about his sauna club.
      The majority of them get interested immediately and lean forward about four inches to hear more.
      Roughly one in five take a diametrically opposed view of the subject, reports Mokko.
      "Some people just don't get the concept at all. Those to whom the whole idea of sauna conjures up images of naked bodies, sexuality, and something a bit shady and grubby, they recoil around four inches backwards when I so much as mention the society."
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 20.3.2010
     
     
The writer of the article is the Helsingin Sanomat correspondent in Washington.


Links:
  Washington Post 18.3.2010: "At Finnish Embassy, the heat is on"
  Facebook: The Diplomatic Finnish Sauna Society of D.C.
  Embassy of Finland, Washington DC

PEKKA MYKKÄNEN / Helsingin Sanomat
pekka.mykkanen@hs.fi