[2] He met his wife, Kashiko, when she came to work at the company as his secretary, and they used their honeymoon in 1932 to make the first of many trips to Europe to acquire movies for the Japanese market.

Among his earliest successes were Leontine Sagan's Mädchen in Uniform, although he also worked with many other European directors, including G. W. Pabst, René Clair, Fritz Lang and Julien Duvivier.

The Japanese Army then asked Kawakita to head the newly formed China United Productions Ltd. (or "Zhonglian" for short); a merger between Xinhua Film Company and eleven other Shanghai studios.

Although Kawakita maintained relations with high-ranking officials in the Japanese military and the Nanjing Nationalist government (Shanghai mayor Chen Gongbo as honorary president), he insisted that the company act independently and to continue to pursue entertainment themes over propaganda, and thus often encountered opposition from Japanese censors and military officials, so much so that there were rumors of a plot by the Kwantung Army[2] or of the Kempeitai[4] to assassinate him.

He continued to make efforts to promote Japanese cinema overseas, and screened Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 where it won the Golden Lion award.

[5] In 1960, Kawakita established the Japan Film Library Council to promote Japanese cinema overseas and to make materials available to foreign researchers.