• 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.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.42
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• pp.205-240
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• 2016

The combination of animals has been developed in each of the cultural spheres as a method of metaphor and symbolism of the cultural code. However, its symbolism is not a fixed constant, but a variable and relative constant. This work focused on its features in comparison with East Asian cultural spheres comedic stories and proverbs. Consequently, several features were identified. First, the combinations of animals in similar comedic stories and proverbs among Korea, Japan and China show a difference in point of view. Korean focuses on the difference of the two animals, but Chinese and Japanese focus on the differences in value and level. Second, the method of anthropomorphization is relatively more developed in China and Japan than Korea. The combinations of animals of Chinese comedic stories and proverbs particularly in the field of anthropomorphization, are most focused on age and sex of the animal. The animal's age or sex remains mostly undetermined in Korean animal's proverbs, unlike Chinese proverbs. On the other hand, two animals in Japanese comedic stories and proverbs are usually of the male and female gender from. Third, the combinations of animals of Chinese and Japanese focus on the animal's body and its characteristics of action. Chinese and Japanese combine the characteristics of the two animal's bodies and actions. This feature apparently caused the resultant combinations of the animal's body parts, for example, the Dragon. Understanding of the combinations of two animals is a good portal into the features of East Asian culture sphere.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.130-140
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• 2015

With the growth of media platforms and fierce competition in the media market, there have been focus on cross media storytelling, a remediation of content already proven successful to another type of medium. In particular, webtoons have emerged as being successful source media, and this study analyzes how the webtoon 's narrative is expanded and transformed in the remediation process into TV drama. The results showed that, the webtoon , which was targeted at a relatively more specific audience, objectively described stories of the life and hardships of an office worker through a contractual employee at a trading company navigating work life based on strategies of Baduk; while the TV drama version, which aims to appeal to a broader audience, strengthened popular narratives with topics of social issues such as 'hardships of the non-permanent employee', 'sexual discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace', 'difficulties of a working mom', and 'romance between new colleagues'. In addition, in order to create dramatic enjoyment, the drama's storytelling strategy incorporated conflicts by creating confrontational relationships among good and evil characters, and added humanism and comedic effect.