With a franchise as extensive as Star Wars, it’s sometimes amazing to see how things we’ve been seeing for decades we assumed otherwise from Jedi lore So much so that it surprises us when it suddenly appears on this week’s episode of “Ahsoka” (1×03). is named for the first time.
As we told you in the synopsis, part of Time to Fly focuses on Sabina Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) resuming Jedi training. After a while, Ahsoka Tano herself (Rosario Dawson) decides it’s time for her Padawan to practice a fight blindly and puts an opaque mask on him.
The Zatochi Technique
This begins the practice of what they have come to call Zatochi, a technique not uncommon in the Star Wars universe, as we are already seeing Luke Skywalker use it aboard the Millennium Falcon in the first “Star Wars” (or “Episode IV: A New Hope”). The idea is to trust your other senses and recognize threats by relying on the Force.
Following the inspiration that Star Wars took from samurai cinema and which George Lucas himself also widely recognized (e.g., “The Hidden Fortress”), ttheword “zatochi” actually comes from “Chanbara Japanese. Specifically, by one of the mythical characters of the genre, Zatichi.
Created by the writer Kan Shimozawa, Zatoichi is a blind drifter, masseur, and gamer who lives in the late Edo era. Despite his lack of vision, he was secretly an expert in both swordplay and archery. Many of his adventures followed the classic formula of the vagabond who encounters a threat everywhere (yakuza, unfair rulers, etc.) and decides to face it to protect the innocent.
The character starred in a total of 26 films and a four-season series starring Shintaro Katsu between 1962 and 1989. However, the most famous part was “Zatoichi,” which he directed and starred in with Takeshi Kitano, who took that Silver Lion at the 2003 Venice Film Festival.
Also in 1989, we had a western adaptation of the character Blind Fury, starring Rutger Hauer as a soldier going blind in the Vietnam War and beginning to train in the art of the sword.
