What does 計画 Keikaku mean?
Keikaku (計画) just means plan. One Death Note fansub kept the Japanese word and footnoted it, and the note became the most famous TL joke in fandom.
- Written
- 計画 (keikaku)
- Literally
- 計 (kei, to measure) with 画 (kaku, to draw up). A plan: an entirely ordinary word for a scheme, project or programme.
- As slang
- Standard vocabulary with no colour at all in Japanese. Its fame in English is a joke about translation, not about the word.
- In anime
- The Death Note fansub that rendered just as planned as just according to keikaku, footnoted with keikaku means plan, became fandom's shorthand for translator excess.
Keikaku means plan. That is the entire semantic content of the word, and the reason it has a page here is what one subtitler did with it.
The word itself
計 (kei) is to measure or calculate, the character in words for clocks and meters. 画 (kaku) is to draw up or mark out. Together: a plan, a project, a scheme. It is ordinary vocabulary, no more exotic in Japanese than plan is in English, and any bilingual dictionary dispatches it in one line.
The subtitle
Death Note's twenty-fourth episode contains Light Yagami's signature moment of triumph, the smirk and the line rendered officially as just as planned. One fansub group instead subtitled it just according to keikaku, and added a translator's note at the top of the frame: keikaku means plan.
The screenshot began circulating in 2007, and the note became the most quoted translator's note in fandom history, because it distils an entire debate into one frame: if keikaku means plan, the note concedes the word needed no keeping.
What the joke is actually about
Fansubbing culture in that era prized fidelity signals. Leaving Japanese words untranslated, honorifics intact, attack names in romaji, was a way of performing respect for the source and flattering the audience's insider knowledge. Sometimes that is defensible: this site maintains a glossary of words whose meanings genuinely resist single English equivalents.
The joke lands because keikaku is the perfect counterexample. It has an exact English equivalent, the subtitler kept it anyway, and then had to explain it, which is untranslation performed for its own sake. The screenshot became shorthand for the whole failure mode.
The useful lesson in it
The line between borrowing and affectation is whether the word carries something English cannot. Senpai carries a structure; tsundere carries a type; keikaku carries nothing plan does not. Fandom's most famous translation joke is, underneath, a perfectly sound principle of translation: keep the word when it earns its keep, and this one did not.
Quick answers
What does keikaku mean?
計 (kei, to measure) with 画 (kaku, to draw up). A plan: an entirely ordinary word for a scheme, project or programme.
Is keikaku an insult?
Standard vocabulary with no colour at all in Japanese. Its fame in English is a joke about translation, not about the word.
What does keikaku mean in anime?
The Death Note fansub that rendered just as planned as just according to keikaku, footnoted with keikaku means plan, became fandom's shorthand for translator excess.