A dated Daiei 3 (1523), made in the smith's fifty-seventh year and signed in full as no resident, Yosozaemon no Jo Sukesada, descends in the Hachisuka family and is the highest-papered blade in this record. Sukesada is less a man than a house. The name belongs to the forges of the late that scholars group together as , and of these the published sources are blunt about its scale: "of the smiths of the late , the most prosperous was the Sukesada family". The early-modern reference Hayami-dashi, the published commentary notes, "lists as many as twenty-one Sukesada smiths who add a personal name to the signature". Within that crowd one branch stands first by name and by hand, the Yosozaemon no Jo line, of whom the first generation, born in Onin 1 by back-count from a inscribed made at age seventy-one in Tenbun 6, is the apex of the name. The published record states the ranking plainly: "among the Sukesada of the name, the one who styles himself Yosozaemon no Jo is the most famous, and the most skilled".
His characteristic hand is the temper the late workshops made their own. Over the body runs an open-waisted that builds into a double-structured , the - that more than any other feature marks a blade, mixed with - and pointed , and entering richly, the tending to tighten, adhering, small interspersed and the bright. The published sources call the dated that carry it the representative work not of one smith only: one Jubi-era piece they describe as "a typical work among blades, and among works of the hand the most excellent representative example". It is a temper of breadth rather than of a single flourish, the wide, complex line answering the broad and of the late- on which it most often appears.
The is the foil to that animated edge. It is a forged tight and well packed, fine laid over it like dust and a fine, dense woven through, the surface refined and high in quality. On the best signed pieces a faint rises along the , the last trace of the bright reflection that filled the school's prime, here grown thin in the steel of a later, busier age. The most often runs into a small round or enters as a , slightly pointed, with and a turnback that runs a little long. Across the corpus the activity is carried in abundant and , with and frequent, the temper deep in and rather than in towering clusters of clove.
What lifts Yosozaemon above the run of the house is the breadth the judges keep naming. Beyond the double-structured he commands two further registers. One is the flamboyant face: a temper that climbs the body into full with frequent and , deep in , the standing and the gathered answering each other. The published sources note that is apt to lack refinement, yet single out his examples as well made, and one such blade is a collaboration signed jointly with Genbei no Jo Sukesada, the two foremost personal names of the family on one . The other is the calm face, the deliberately quiet and , broad and shallowly undulating, sometimes mixed with and fushi; of these the commentary remarks that even "when he tempers a he is skilled", and elsewhere that he is "a master among the smiths, accomplished alike in and in ". One unusual blade divides the temper into double-structured at the and and bridges the span between with , a the judges call rare. Beneath all of this sits the chronology of the name itself, the central scholarly question around Sukesada: a second generation shares the Yosozaemon signature, the records two Yozaemon smiths a generation apart, and a body of blades carries the Sukesada name with no personal name at all, judged to the house by era and quality.
What sets him apart within his own school he is given by the judges who place him there. His bright, well-packed and the wide, double-structured distinguish him from the plainer mass of late- production, while the faintness of his and the busy complexity of his edge separate him from the classical of two centuries before. The published commentary names "the -particular double-structured he tempers" as the signature of his typical work, and ranks his finest dated as representative of all , not of Sukesada alone. He stands beside his fellow late- master Kiyomitsu as one of the two great names of the workshop's final age, and his hand is the standard against which the school's unsigned blades are measured.
For the collector Yosozaemon no Jo Sukesada is the most attainable of the great names, which is to say attainable in a way the masters are not, never that he is common at the top. Fujishiro grades the first generation Jo-jo , and the Toko Taikan values his work at 1,000 yen. He has no National Treasures; his record on this evidence runs through one Important Cultural Property and one blade among fifty-nine and a long file of prewar Bijutsuhin, so the higher tiers number a little over sixty designated works on record and reach the market only rarely, a notable event when one does. His blades are kept in long-held collections and houses grounded in their own provenance: the , made in his fifty-seventh year, is "a single blade of excellent workmanship transmitted in the Hachisuka family", while the Mori and Ii houses, the Imperial collection, and a recorded as having belonged to the warrior Yamanaka Shikanosuke carry others. A signed and dated Yosozaemon Sukesada, broad, healthy and bright, with the open-waisted reading clearly down its edge, is the late- blade a serious collector can realistically hope to encounter, and the surest single document of how worked in its last great generation.
