was the base of the Kaneshige line, whose first master, Izumi no Kami Fujiwara Kaneshige, emerged among the city's swordsmiths after the Yasutsugu and Hankei. The follow the account in the Kokon Kajibikō that he began as an arrowhead smith (yanone-kaji) in , then moved to and turned to forging blades; his earliest dated work is a inscribed 'ei 2 (1625), with dated pieces running into the Meireki era. A second smith signing Kazusa no (and at times Kazusa no Kami) Fujiwara Kaneshige, whose common name is given as Tsuji Sukeemon, is treated as the son or pupil of the first and the second generation, born in 'ei 3 (1626) and most active in the and Enpō years. The two were long held to be one man, the story being that, retained by the Tōdō house under Izumi no Kami, he changed his title to avoid sharing his lord's court designation; signed and age-dated works by Tsuji Kazusa no alongside Yasutsugu and Shimosaka Ichinojō have since shown them to be separate individuals. The second generation also worked pieces inscribed "made at Anotsu in Seshū," and recent comparison of the signatures has raised the possibility of substitute signing by Sukekurō Kanetsune.
Recognition of the hand rests on a small set of recurring traits. The is a tight , sometimes standing or flowing toward , with fine densely applied and entering. The first generation divides into two modes: a base carrying linked and entering , and a wide bearing shallow in which the is deep, the thick, and the bright and , with and . The second generation concentrates on , a -toned temper of linked with aligned heads; the single out a fixed one-two rhythm, in which a single is followed by two, as a principal point of appreciation, together with thick , deep , abundant , and fine and . Across both hands the is the standard width with marked taper, shallow , and a compact of the period, the mostly with and , and the long signature cut in a reishō clerical script with -tending file marks read as an early form of the later decorative finish.
The repeatedly place Kaneshige beside Nagasone Kotetsu, rendered also as Tōru, Batetsu, and Matetsu in these records, and beside the Hōjōji group of the circle; one notes the tradition that the second generation was Kotetsu's teacher, and a with a Yamano cutting-test inscription dated Manji 4 (1661) carries a fully realized held to precede Kotetsu's own. Cutting-test inscriptions are a frequent feature of the line: gold-inlaid by Yamano Ka'emon no Jō Nagahisa appear often, with Yamano Kanjūrō named as Ka'emon's earlier form before the Shōhō era, alongside mitsudō and stacked-body tests by Shibasaki Denzaemon Masatsugu and Maejima Hachirō Tomotsugu. The dated and provenanced blades in the register, signed Izumi no Kami, Kazusa no , and Kazusa no Kami, document a coherent two-generation workshop whose and bright secured its standing among the leading smiths of .