Hello, This is my first post to this mailing list. I am a natural language processing developer and have lots of excitement on Toree/Spark, but this post is not for technical discussions. This is on the "Torii" symbol used for this project.
I believe the Toree project should not use the "Torii" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torii) symbol for the following two reasons: 1. It is a religious symbol ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_symbol) in Japan. 2. It can be considered as offensive because it can remind people of "State Shinto" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Shinto), which Imperial Japan had ideologically used. 2 is the more delicate issue. As a Japanese, I understand the difference between State Shinto and traditional Shinto ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinto) and do not think the use of Torii symbol is always offensive, but there is no reason to take such a risk. And it is a religious symbol to many Japanese anyway and I believe it should not be used for anything that is irrelevant to Shinto. Personally I think the name of the project "Toree" itself would be OK because it has a different spelling from "Torii". At first, I thought it was named from "Tory" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tory). I would like to hear opinions on this from Toree developement community. Thank you. Tami (Masaaki) Takamiya
