So I was watching A New Hope recently, and I got to thinking that Obi-Wan seems to depend more on stealth and tricks than on his lightsaber skills--for example, eluding those two Stormtroopers by causing them to look toward's an imagined sound.

In Empire Strikes Back, Luke also does his fair amount of sneaking around. Then there's Yoda, who manages to hide his identity--Luke doesn't figure him out until Yoda outright confesses.

So I got to wondering--I've heard the analogy before that the Jedi were either a sort of Knightly order or a Samurai-like society, but couldn't it be possible they were more akin to Ninja?

I think it would make a prequel story more interesting in that light. In Japanese history, ninja served as effective guards and peacekeepers mostly because they were not easily observed--they tended to disguise what they were by taking on mundane, everyday roles. The emperor Tokugawa defended his castle by hiring a clan of Ninja as his gardeners, case in point.

So there's a twist to the old story about how the Emperor systematically destroyed the Jedi Knights--someone would have to be an insider and betray their identities, instead of them being galactic civil servants who are known by all.

What think?