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Is Obi-Wan Chinese?




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Only diff was the company logo and the space for hand written prices. You're probably thinking of R2-D2, C3P-0, or one of the other droids.

As for the topic at hand, I read once that Lucas wrote the part with Mifune in mind, which in the world of Lucas could mean a) it's a baseless fan rumor, b) they tried seriously to get him, or c) it was a thought Lucas had one afternoon between being serious about film making and serious about cars. The other part is that Mifune was unwilling in some versions and unable in others. I have read that Mifune was uncomfortable with the way his English speaking parts came out and gave up on them. He also at one point was doing work mainly through daily contracts, ie. it would have been impossible to get him to do several weeks at a time in Tunisia, England, or anywhere outside of Japan. The people who made Shogun contemplated recasting because he was only available on odd days between his other paying gigs.

For the name itself, Lucas, at least during the making of Jedi, said that when it came to alien languages, he liked to mix and match. The musical number in Jedi was supposed to be in Mandarin, Swahili, and other languages with some of the words outright slurred. So, while Kenobi sounds Japanese to me, Obi-Wan might be a reference to some of the Chinese cinema that played alongside the Japanese in grind houses here in the states. Or he might have just made it up. "It sounds foreign enough."
 
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OK, thanks for the info Manonthewave. I guess the memory really does cheat.

I'm sure there was something calling him OB-1 somewhere. I remember school yard discussions as to whether this was proof he was actually a clone, OB-1 being his 'serial number' or some such.
 
Obi-Wan does sound rather Chinese to me, and can be compared to O-lan (a character in The Good Earth, although that book was written by an American author).
 
Funny, "Obi-Wan" doesn't sound at all Chinese to me. Like I said above, it would be a damn unusual phonetic combination for a Chinese given name, and it certainly wouldn't be transliterated that way in any standard system. It's closer to Japanese.
 
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