珈琲 is kanji for coffee.
It is pronounce kohi. Usually Japanese use the katakana コーヒー kohi for coffee. Kohi is a word borrowed from English and Dutch. And, katakana is a phonetic alphabet, one of two, that is used to write borrowed foreign words.
I found an article Online that explained that 珈琲 is used to indicate special coffee made by a master. When coffee was brought to Japan by the Dutch in the 17th century, people with money and prestige (samurai, aristocrats) were more enamored with the sweet taste of green tea made from newly picked leaves (新茶) than that weird bitter tasting liquid brought in by the devil foreigner.
Merchants, who are especially adept in Japan, both then and now, found a way to make coffee seem more aesthetically appealing - they gave coffee a beautiful name. 珈琲 is kanji that means a jeweled ornament and a string of pearls. Hmmm. What does that have to do with coffee? Maybe the kanji are just beautiful. Or, maybe it was a great marketing idea that worked.
Remember that cigarette makers in the United States in the 1950s made cigarettes seem more appealing to women by showing a tall thin model holding a long white cigarette. And who wasn’t attracted to the killer handsome cowboy holding a cigarette while riding a horse? If merchants can sell a cancer-causing burning glop of leaves and call it sophisticated, why couldn’t the Japanese 300 years earlier sell a black cup of sludge and call it a jewel?
