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ホワイト企業 howaito kigyou
A company that lets you have a life.
What does howaito kigyou mean?
The opposite of ブラック企業: overtime is paid, holidays are real, and nobody messages you at night. Job hunters treat it as the highest possible compliment.
Example
今の職場はホワイト企業で、有給も取りやすい。
My current workplace is a good one; taking paid leave is easy.
Vibe
Who you can say this to, and how it lands.
Safe to use Fine in ordinary conversation.
The story behind howaito kigyou
This one is a back-formation. ブラック企業 arrived first and did the cultural work; once a country has a word for the bad employer it needs one for the opposite, and ホワイト企業 filled the slot during the job-hunting boom years of the 2010s. It is now a genuine search category, with rankings, checklists and anxious parents.
The interesting sequel is ゆるブラック, loosely black — a workplace so undemanding that young employees fear they are learning nothing and will be unemployable in five years. People leave those jobs too. Between the company that consumes you and the one that lets you drift, an entire generation has been trying to describe what a good job actually is.
Get howaito kigyou in your pocket
ホワイト企業 is one of 308 words in YABAI, a Japanese culture snack for Android. Every word comes with its meaning, an example sentence, a vibe check and a story like the one above — in 13 languages, read aloud by your device. Paid app: no ads, no sign-up, no subscription.
