Among the provincial lineages of the Hokurikudo, the Fujishima school took its name and its base from the village of Fujishima in province, where Tomoshige stands as founder and the name he set down passed through several generations from the close of the period across the and on into the early-modern era. The members place the chronological anchor with care: the earliest firmly dated work is a of Oei 2 (1395), and the finds nothing among the surviving blades that goes back earlier than . Old documentary tradition reads the first generation as a pupil of Kunitoshi of Yamashiro, alternatively of Kashu Sanekage or Toshimune, but the published sources doubt each reading in turn, finding no stylistic tie to Kunitoshi and a chronological impossibility with Sanekage; judging from the make and the finish, they settle by elimination toward the Yamato tradition, close to the Yamato Shikkake hand. A held at Atsuta Shrine and a two-character read as the oldest surviving piece bracket the early end of the line.
The recognition of the school lives in its . The members agree on a board-grained that mixes in and runs to , standing somewhat open (), the surface gathering and , the steel carrying a distinct blackish cast named 'a-iro and tied directly to the northern provinces as hokkoku-; a faint whitish rises quietly against this dark ground rather than a bright reflection. Over that the school tempers a into which box-shaped (-ba), pointed and angular () teeth enter together with and , the running rather long, the -laden with sweeping it and entering, small and scattered here and there. The reads the feel of it as a make in which temperament and flavor coexist, the running straight or into a , often swept with or running to . The members also mark the short blades apart: on the the hand can quiet to a and a narrow or low with , the sometimes clouding to , the turning jizo-like or returning deep, this the simplest face of the Yamato base while the dark steel keeps its northern mark.
To a Fujishima blade the eye works the conjunction rather than any single trait: the standing dark read together with the box-and-pointed and the constant names the school where a clean or a true Yamashiro would not. The members note works read variously toward an air, toward Naoe and Sekishu Naotsuna, the and northern lines the school sits between, in feel to the and smiths of the region. Among the membership Tomoshige carries the name and the standing; Fujishiro rates the founder Chu-jo and places others among the middle ranks of the smiths, and the most highly regarded work falls in the Oei generation while the work survives most often. The single finest piece is a great spear (o-mi-) signed Fujishima Tomoshige and carved with a and the deity-name Myoken Daibosatsu, which the published sources judge not merely the best spear of the school but one of the representative famous spears of its age; surviving by the line are noted as rare, their valued as dating evidence. Provenance gathers around named houses recorded in the blades themselves, an Oei descended in the Inaba house and a held in the Imperial collection, heritage pieces in long-standing hands; yet the line is not among the unattainable names, and a Tomoshige remains a realistic if uncommon encounter for the patient collector, valued for the way a single dark-steeled blade carries the whole northern school in its .