[1] When the church's activity was sluggish, there would be fervent 2-3 hour meetings between the father and son Kawakami along with pastors Kousuke Tomeoka and Shunpei Honma, at which young Jōtarō would often be bored.

[citation needed] At the time that Kawakami was attending Rikkyō Middle School, the daily newspaper known as Yoruzuchōhō (万朝報) carried an article in 1903 by Sakai Toshihiko and Kōtoku Shūsui which criticised the Russo-Japanese War.

[3] He had initially prepared to work for the Government-General of Korea, but he loathed the military rule in place over there, and so he became a lecturer at Rikkyō University instead.

While teaching here, Kawakami encountered the Christian pacifist thinker Toyohiko Kagawa, from which he began to serve as a lecturer at a manual labour school.

Furthermore, at the time he was still teaching at Kwansei Gakuin, Kawakami was admitted into Tokyo Imperial University Law School's undergraduate program that specialised in jurisprudence, through which he obtained the needed qualifications for being a lawyer.

[citation needed] At the time that Kawakami was still a professor at Kwansai Gakuin, he decided to marry Sueko Hiraiwa, who had never met and only knew through the occasional exchange of letters.

[4] Being that Kawakami had also not consulted his family before choosing to marry, his father also expressed strong opposition, in part because he was prejudiced against educated women.

[6] The 1952 general election was held that same year, Kawakami gave a speech to supporters in which he said:[citation needed] "My long time of being purged is over, it is now at last possible for me to have an audience with you, my friends.

Among you all, ladies and gentlemen, if there are people who are begrudgingly critical of my actions during the war, please make an impartial judgement during the election.

[7] In 1960, when Suehiro Nishio formed the Democratic Socialist Party, some Diet members who belonged to the Kawakami faction of the JSP defected to the DSP.

[8] In so doing, it is said that Chairman Kaoru Ōta of the General Council of Trade Unions of Japan requested Kawakami not to move the entirety of his own faction over to the DSP in exchange for election cooperation.

Kawakami was replaced as party chairman by the far-left faction leader Kōzō Sasaki, who had vigorously opposed the "Structural Reform" policies.