You've intrigued me about this, and I looked into it a little more.
Chihiro Oide, the model for Pretty Style, writes her name 千尋, the same as Chihiro in Spirited Away.
The second character definitely has something to do with questions. It's in the word 尋ねる (tazuneru), which means "to ask, to inquire".
It must also have something to do with distance, because when I looked 千尋 (chihiro) up in the dictionary as a word, I found the meanings "1. great depth (lit: thousand fathoms); bottomless" 2. great height". Another word with the same metaphoric meaning is 万尋 (banjin) , literally "ten-thousand fathoms".
I ran 千尋 through
google.co.jp, and got the result that 千尋 = 1.8288 キロメートル (1000 fathoms = 1.8288 kilometres). lol
I think "great depth" was the intended meaning for the name - I wasn't actually aware that "chihiro" is a real vocabulary word until now. I'd just seen the character 尋 in alot of names containing "hiro" so I assumed it was chosen because of the sound.
This message was edited 12/8/2010, 1:58 PM