Within the province of , where Masamune and his successors had set the - on its course, a late body of smiths carried that workmanship forward through the period after the classic masters had passed. These are the Sue- (末相州), the late line that took up the manner of Hiromitsu and Akihiro and worked it into the sixteenth century under the patronage of the Later Hojo of Odawara. The published sources draw a division within the group: one body of smiths remained at while a separate circle lived at Odawara under the Hojo, the latter collectively called the Odawara-. The Tsunahiro line anchors the whole, its transmitted as a descendant of Hiromasa who first signed Masahiro, summoned by Hojo Ujitsuna to Odawara and granted the character ; the name then passed as a workshop title through several generations into the period. Around it stand Tsunaie, a retained smith of the Hojo regarded among the more skilled of the late line; Fusamune, the Odawara smith whose carving carries a long reputation; the mid- Hiromasa, transmitted as the third generation of his name; Masahiro, a lineage of four or five generations said to descend from a younger son of Masamune; and Hirotsugu of , who also bears Tenbun-era inscriptions tying him to Suruga.
The shared vocabulary of the school is read off temper, steel, and carving together. The is an mixed with and that tends to stand and open rather than gather tightly, adhering across it with entering, the Odawara hands (Fusamune above all) tightening this toward a packed . Over that ground the smiths temper a into which , , the arrow-notch tooth, and enter, the widening as it rises; attaches with and , and with are then carried across the until the whole becomes , the full-temper manner the sources name as the inheritance from Hiromitsu and Akihiro. The Odawara face leans angular and compound, heads breaking into doubled and structures over a tight, -dominant , while the face of Tsunahiro keeps the broader, -laced . Devotional carving recurs throughout, true and grass , on a lotus , and in raised relief, and incised invocations such as . Set against the classic - apex, the divergence is one of register rather than kind: where the and masters reached great depth of and clarity of steel, the late line works a flatter, more demonstrative over a standing grain, the steel less deep and the less profound, the flamboyance of full temper standing in for the restrained command of the founders.
For , the Sue- blade announces itself by the (compact with , or of wide with ) carrying full over an open, standing , with the dense devotional the sources treat as a defining mark of work of the era; the absence of the deep, lucid and the -free clarity of the masters separates it from classic . The Odawara hand is told from the hand by its tighter steel, its angular and , and Fusamune's exceptionally refined relief carving. Among the members, Tsunahiro is the first name of the group, the smith who closes the tradition, the published sources naming him well known and highly skilled within the group, with Tsunaie and Fusamune as the next most accomplished; Hiromasa and Masahiro furnish the dated, -signed documents on which the divided generations are anchored. Provenance, where it survives, is real and distinguished: a Tsunahiro bears the ownership inscription of the Hojo retainer Sakurai Daigaku and later passed to Okubo Ichio, while one of his blades descends into the Imperial collection; most members, however, carry no recorded or temple history, their standing resting on the rarity of a signed late- blade and the carving and steel the sources praise on each. A signed Sue- work, seldom met yet not locked away as national patrimony, offers the student the register of the - read whole.