A Joke in Spirited Away?

Japanese Language
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I watched Spirited Away last night, and I wondered if I spotted a joke that I haven’t been able to find an answer for online.

There’s a bit of background, so please bear with me!

Background: Spirited Away is influenced to some degree by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Apart from the obvious “girl enters a dreamlike wonderland”, there are similarities in tone and humour. There is a Latin language joke in Alice that Lewis Carroll used (“you can have jam yesterday or jam tomorrow, but you can’t have jam today”), which is based on how the Latin word for “now” is taught to English school children (“iam” means “now”, when talking about the past or the future, but “nunc” is used when talking about things happening “now” in the present tense).

While to most of today’s audience, this joke is a bit of psychedelic whimsy or classic Victorian dream nonsense, but Lewis Carroll was making a specific joke that would have been understood by his immediate audience.

I was wondering if I spotted a similar joke in Spirited Away.

The Yubaba character has three heads (Kashira) that look like peas or edamame beans in her office. They resemble Daruma dolls to some extent, but not completely, so I was wondering if Miyazaki was also making a Lewis Carroll-style language joke here that might be understood by a Japanese audience.

The kanji for “head” is a compound kanji with “pea/bean” + “head”, so anyone reading or writing kanji (or learning it in school) would recognise pea+head as "head.

The Kashira look like pea heads, so… a humorous in-joke? Or am I stretching too far? (or am i a genius???11)

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A cursory web search seems to indicate that nobody really knows for sure but some theorize that it may be related to this creature:

The pea thing seems like a bit of a stretch to me but who knows…

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In my experience, Japanese people are highly unlikely to understand that to be a joke, or recognize any potential connection, if it was intentional. Unless they had the kanji very clearly written on them or something, people would likely not think of the kanji.

Edit: to expand on what I said above, even though 頁 does mean head, it’s not a common kanji that the average person encounters much on their own. If they do recognize it, they’re likely to think of its nickname as a radical, おおがい (because it looks like a bigger version of 貝). The peculiar reading of ページ might come to mind as well. But most won’t immediately think of the meaning “head” on its own unless they’re the kind of person who regularly thinks about breaking kanji into their parts.

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