In 1997, two American writers published a book arguing that history runs in roughly 80-year cycles, and that the United States was about to enter the most disruptive phase of one. The book was The Fourth Turning, by William Strauss and Neil Howe.
At the time, the U.S. had just won the Cold War, the dot-com boom was beginning, and Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis was the conventional wisdom. The book was largely dismissed.
Twenty-six years later, in 2023, the surviving co-author Neil Howe published a sequel, The Fourth Turning Is Here. His core claim: the predicted crisis began in 2008 with the financial collapse, escalated through Brexit, Trump’s first election, the pandemic, and the Russia-Ukraine war, and is now approaching its climax. He places that climax somewhere between 2028 and 2033.
I am not here to argue that Strauss and Howe are right. Generational cycle theories have a long history of fitting the data after the fact, and Howe’s 2023 book is not entirely innocent of that habit.
But the framework is worth taking seriously as a hypothesis—not because it predicts the future precisely, but because it forces a useful question: if the United States and parts of Europe are heading into a period of acute political, economic, and institutional stress over the next five to seven years, what does that mean for global B2B strategy, and specifically for the case for entering Japan?
That is the question this article addresses.
What the theory actually claims
The Strauss-Howe framework divides each ~80-year cycle (“saeculum”) into four roughly 20-year phases.
A High of strong institutions and conformity, in the U.S. running from 1946 to 1964. An Awakening of cultural and spiritual rebellion, 1964 to 1984. An Unraveling of institutional decay and individualism, 1984 to 2008. And finally a Crisis in which the existing order breaks down and a new one is forged—2008 to roughly 2033, by Howe’s current dating.
The theory’s evidentiary backbone is that previous American crises—the Revolution, the Civil War, the Depression and Second World War—each came roughly 80 years apart, each lasted about 20 years, and each ended with a fundamentally restructured political and economic order.
If the current crisis follows that pattern, its resolution—not its peak—is still ahead of us. The peak, according to Howe, is the late 2020s.
What is actually happening, and what could happen
Howe identifies several stress vectors converging in the second half of this decade.
Geopolitical fragmentation. The Russia-Ukraine war has hardened into a long-term reality, and U.S.-China tension over Taiwan has a non-trivial probability of escalating into direct confrontation in the 2027–2030 window, by Howe’s reading. Whether or not that specific scenario materializes, the era of frictionless globalization is over.
Domestic political instability in the U.S. Constitutional tensions—around elections, the courts, federal-state relations, and the legitimacy of basic political institutions—have intensified and show no clear path to resolution. A second Trump term, regardless of one’s politics, has accelerated rather than stabilized these dynamics.
Economic structural strain. Persistent inflation pressure, sovereign debt levels approaching limits, and unresolved questions about social security and entitlements create a backdrop where any single shock can cascade into something larger.
The AI transition. ChatGPT’s release in late 2022 marked the beginning of a labor and information-order disruption whose end-state is genuinely unknown. Howe folds this into the crisis pattern; whether or not that is intellectually clean, it is clearly a major source of volatility.
Climate-driven instability. Extreme weather, food security pressure, and migration flows interact with all of the above.
None of these is a prediction. The argument is that their combination, peaking in the late 2020s, has a meaningful probability of producing a non-linear break in how the global system works.
The hedge that almost no one is pricing
Now consider Japan against this backdrop.
Japan is, by international standards, an unusually stable polity. Its political dysfunctions are real but quiet. Its institutional continuity is high. Its constitutional framework has not been seriously contested in decades. Its social cohesion, while declining, remains an order of magnitude better than what most G7 peers are experiencing.
Its currency is weak, which—from a foreign investor’s perspective—means asset prices and operating costs are at multi-decade lows in dollar or euro terms.
If you are a B2B SaaS executive in San Francisco, London, or Berlin, looking at the next five years and trying to figure out where to deploy capital and headcount, Japan starts looking different from how it looked five years ago. It is no longer just “the third-largest economy with a difficult sales culture.” It is a stable, English-friendly-enough, AI-hungry, cash-rich market sitting adjacent to the most likely zones of disruption rather than inside them.
That is not a sentimental case. It is a portfolio-construction case.
The companies that quietly figured this out before 2022 are already here. The ones that figure it out in 2027 will be late.
Why now, specifically: three structural windows
Three structural factors make 2025–2027 a uniquely favorable window for entry.
The yen
At the time of writing, the yen-dollar rate sits at levels not seen since the 1980s. Office rents, salaries for senior bilingual hires, M&A targets, and operational expenses are dramatically cheaper in foreign-currency terms than they were a decade ago.
This is a temporary condition. When the yen recovers—and historically it always has—the cost basis of late entrants will be permanently higher than that of those who established footprint during the weak-yen window.
Accelerating AI adoption among Japanese SMEs
Until 2023, the Japanese mid-market was famously resistant to digital tools. That has shifted faster than most foreign observers realize.
Generative AI in particular has broken through the previous adoption barriers because it works in Japanese, integrates with existing workflows without major IT projects, and provides immediate productivity returns. Foreign B2B SaaS that can land now will be embedded by the time the market matures.
The talent and partner ecosystem
Japan’s economy remains relationship-heavy, and entering without local partners remains the single most common cause of failed market-entry attempts.
The pool of credible bilingual operators—those with both native-level Japanese business fluency and direct experience working with foreign B2B companies—is small and largely already engaged. Securing that capacity earlier in the cycle is materially easier than securing it during a rush.
What this means in practice
If you are running a B2B SaaS company with $20M–$200M ARR, primarily U.S. or European, and you have been treating Japan as a “phase 3” or “post-IPO” market, the Fourth Turning hypothesis is a reason to revisit that timeline.
The argument is not “Japan will become a primary market overnight.” It is that Japan is the lowest-correlation viable expansion market your portfolio currently lacks, and the cost of establishing real presence here is lower than it has been in 40 years.
Concretely, that means three things.
First, a real beachhead, not a flag. Hiring a single country manager and listing Japan on the website is not market entry. A serious entry involves a localized product (not just translated UI), local enterprise sales processes, local partnership infrastructure, and local hiring at multiple levels. The cost of doing this in 2025 is materially lower than it will be in 2028.
Second, operational redundancy. If your core engineering, sales, and customer success functions are concentrated in San Francisco, London, or both, the case for distributing some of that capacity to Tokyo is not just about market access. It is about not being entirely exposed to whichever cities or regions face the most acute disruption during the late-2020s crisis peak.
Third, currency-aware positioning. Build operating cost basis in yen now while the yen is weak. Even if your revenue is dollar-denominated, your cost stack benefits from being partially in a currency that is currently undervalued by historical standards.
The honest version of the argument
I want to be clear about what I am not saying.
I am not saying The Fourth Turning is correct. I am not saying the U.S. will collapse, or that Europe will fragment, or that Asia will go to war. The base rate of catastrophic predictions actually materializing is low, and prudent strategy never assumes the worst case.
What I am saying is this: the probability that the next five to seven years contain at least one major non-linear event—a regional conflict, a sovereign debt crisis, a constitutional rupture in a major democracy, an AI-driven labor dislocation, a climate-driven supply shock, or some combination—is materially higher than the historical base rate.
In a world where that probability is, say, 30 to 40 percent rather than 5 percent, your portfolio of geographic and operational dependencies needs to look different from what is optimal in a stable world. Japan, for the specific structural reasons outlined above, is one of the few major-economy hedges available.
The cost of being wrong about this thesis—of entering Japan and finding that the late 2020s look like the late 2010s—is bounded. You have added a market.
The cost of being right and not having moved is unbounded. You are trying to enter Japan during a global capital reallocation, alongside everyone else who finally figured it out.
That asymmetry is the entire argument.
Working with us on Japan entry
For foreign B2B companies evaluating whether Japan should move up their roadmap—and for companies already in motion who need a partner on the ground—z0z0.jp handles market entry strategy, partner identification, localization, and ongoing advisory. Initial consultations are complimentary.