>>36433970It’s a stylistic choice. There’s no hard and fast rule that all foreign words must be rendered in katakana—“tenpura” is a Portuguese loanword (tempera) normally rendered in kanji and hiragana, for example, and before the 20th century, katakana were essentially just used as a hiragana substitute on government documents because they “looked more masculine.” No, really. Most Japanese Buddhist terms are Sanskrit or Pali with kanji approximations, too.
