Returning to UvA for a one-year sabbatical, Kakita is researching 17th-century Dutch art—particularly trompe-l'œil and anamorphic paintings—by drawing on epideictic rhetoric, an Isocratean tradition of Classical Greek rhetoric that bridges rhetoric and philosophy. He conceptualizes epideictic rhetoric as a foundational condition that constitutes culture, developing it into a general theory of rhetorical vision within representation and semiotics. Through this lens and the modality of presence, his work investigates how visual art renders abstract arguments "real" or "immediate," shaping how viewers perceive, evaluate, and respond through bodily sensation. He frames rhetorical vision not merely as biological sight, but as a cognitive, cultural, and unconscious framework, exploring how visual elements—often interacting with touch and text—heighten vividness through the tactile and visual bodily conditions of reality.

His recent publications include the book chapter “Mono to enargeia: 17 seiki oranda geijutsuron ni okeru jōdō no retorikku to sukō” (Objects and Enargeia: The Rhetoric of Affect and the Sublime in 17th-Century Dutch Art Theory), which applies the concept of enargeia to examine the divine sublime in Rembrandt’s The Sacrifice of Abraham as an emotion-driven rhetorical construction of vision. He is also the author of the theoretical article “Komyunikēto suru mono: Jitsuzai to shite no mono to retorikaru na chikara” (Communicating Objects: Objects as Existence and Rhetorical Force), published in the Japanese Journal of Communication Studies.