• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.40
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• pp.7-39
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• 2015

A kite in Japanese is the octopus. The reason is that when they saw the tail of the kite, they remembered the foot of octopus. And this kinds of associative action is called a mitate(見立て) in Japanese. Mitate is similar to metaphor, but these two concepts are somewhat different in causing laugh. Korean and Chinese comedic story's metaphor cause laugh by similarity of two things, but Japanese comedic story's mitate cause laugh by dissimilarity of two things. Chinese and Korean comedic stories focus on 90%'s similarity of two things, but Japanese comedic stories focus on 10%'s dissimilarity of two things. So, in this paper, I tried to consider the mitate of comedic stories of East Asia, and I found that there are the following three features. First, we can see the tendency of Chinese and Korean comedic stories's mitate concern on the human body's physical weakness. But, Japanese comedic stories subject to not the human body's physical weakness but the human's professional or identification temperament. Second, East Asian's comedic stories mitate which related character and word play came from the method of decomposition of Chinese characters, for that area's people have used Chinese characters for a long time. However, there are different cases in Japanese comedic story's Chinese characters mitate, where that characters mitate is combined with two different type's characters, for example, to associate one Chinese character and another Japanese characters, hiragana or katakana. Third, there are next type's mitate which came from misunderstanding of Chinese characters, it can be seen in Chinese and Korean comedic stories. Perhaps, this pattern related with Chinese three syllable's character pattern, which is a Chinese traditional word and character play.