The Hasebe school (長谷部) took its base in Kyoto, at Gojo-bomon Inokuma in Yamashiro, where it settled during the period after a longer migration that the published sources now read as a movement out of Yamato, through maturation in , and at last into the capital. Its founder, Hasebe Kunishige, carried the - learned in the orbit of Masamune, counted in the old reckoning among the Masamune-juttetsu, and his Yamato substrate shows through the manner in his steel. With the school, the Hasebe smiths are named as the pair that represent the Yamashiro workshops of the mid-, and within the line itself Kunishige and his close successor Kuninobu (transmitted variously as younger brother or pupil) stand as the two principal hands, beside whom Kunihira, Munenobu and Shigenobu survive in a small body of signed work.
The collective manner is set, blade after blade, against the smiths Hiromitsu and Akihiro, who worked the flamboyant in the years. The forging is with the grain standing across the surface, tending toward and toward both the edge side and the ridge side, with thick and entering, and on the broadest pieces a -like tone; the strain near the -yori and , uncommon in work, is the surest hallmark the school owns, the Yamato grain surfacing where the pair show none. Over this the temper builds from mixed with rather than the base of and , the deep, thick, and running frequently and long, until , and worked over and carry the whole into full . The runs large and round, the return burned far down the as until it joins the , a separation from the pointed, thrusting of the pair. An extremely thin is a habitual trait of the construction, and the carvings (, , , and grooves near the ) recur throughout. The recurring divergences are individual: Kunishige holds to the grounded mainstream and a quieter, rarer pole of or shallow , while Kuninobu turns his angular toward an arrow-nock () shape and carries the richest carving in the group.
To a Hasebe blade, one reads first the form, which is the period itself: with , wide in , thin in , with a shallow , the build of a or carrying the full over , the round long-returning , and the diagnostic at edge and back. -length work is scarce across the line and survives largely as , the attribution carried by build or by ; reliably signed are the rarest of all, and signed Hasebe Kunishige in five characters near the centre of the , the -gamae at times enclosing gyoku or o, marks the bulk of the founder's surviving pieces. Kunishige is graded Jo-jo by Fujishiro and stands at the head of the tradition, his National Treasure the Heshikiri Hasebe, an whose original signature survives as a , long held by the Kuroda of and cited again and again as the work whose quality confirms the Masamune connection. Other named works anchor the school: the Atsuta Kuninobu at Atsuta Jingu, the signed Karakashi that descended in the Uesugi house among the swords selected by Uesugi Kagekatsu, and the of the Tokugawa shogunal house. The roll runs through the families (Honda, Naruse, Owari Tokugawa, Ikeda), several pieces carry , and the attributions are read as the brush of Mitsutsune. The patrimonial National Treasure and Important Cultural Properties are held by shrine and museum and do not trade; what a private collector may realistically encounter is one of the signed or of the tradeable tier, and even those appear only from time to time, a secure Hasebe a landmark when one does.