Elsewhere in the thread people are saying that loanwords got kanji arbitrarily assigned before katakana was in wide use, and it was it this phase of language de

Elsewhere in the thread people are saying that loanwords got kanji arbitrarily assigned before katakana was in wide use, and it was it this phase of language development that the Japanese and Portuguese first interacted. I don't know the etymology and don't have a Japanese input method handy, but "coffee" is another word occasionally written with kanji to be fancy.