Aritsuna is one of the Ko-Hoki masters of the late to early period, a smith of the old Hoki school that gathered around Yasutsuna. The signature compendia record him as the son of Moritsuna of Hoki, but the published sources set that aside on the evidence of the workmanship and confirm him, together with Yasuie and Sanemori, as belonging to Yasutsuna's line, the record stating plainly that he is confirmed as one of Yasutsuna's group (安綱の一派と確認される); a parallel tradition hands him down as a son of Yasutsuna himself. His signed works are very few, and almost all of them have been shortened in later ages, so the man is most often met not under his own signature but as a attribution (伝有綱) on a greatly shortened whose make the connoisseur is asked to read back to him.
That reading turns on a low, restrained temper. Over the body the published sources describe a small as the basis of the , mixing into it , and small , the temper kept low and the entering well; toward the the line tightens into a slender tone. Across the whole run and appear frequently, the lies deep, and on the unsigned from Ishikawa the is recorded sinking in a subdued, character with attaching, the fine and together imparting an archaic flavor (古調がある). The runs straight and turns back in a small . It is a quiet, old manner, far from the showy of the later , and the low temper and the sunken are exactly what mark the work as old Hoki.
The carries the antiquity. The forging is an that stands slightly toward , mixed with a tendency, fine adhering to it and fine entering. On the greatly shortened from Tokyo the published sources note the grain standing and the fine and frequent, and it is this standing, -laden , rather than any one figure in the temper, that fixes the attribution. The survives the shortening: the build is with an , and though the curvature stays relatively high, remains at the base, and a closes the point, the old high-waisted profile of a late still legible in a blade cut down for later wear.
He is met in two registers of this one early manner. The rarer is the signed , where the bare two-character survives cut on the : there the temper is a carrying and , with adhering well, and in the portions and enter and rise upward from around the middle of the , the carved through both faces with a , while the of this one blade is itself a , restored. The more numerous is the , unsigned handed down as Aritsuna of Hoki, and it is here that the properly lives, the attribution resting on the workmanship rather than on any surviving signature. Of one such blade the published sources write that the traditional attribution to Aritsuna can be accepted, 「有綱の所伝は首肯し得る」, the and together judged good and old in tone.
His standing reaches well beyond Hoki. On the Tokyo the published sources draw the line forward to , recording that smiths such as Masamune and Norishige took just this manner of work as their ideal and on that basis established the tradition, 「相州正宗、則重等はこうした作風を理想として相州伝を創始している」. The old Hoki hand, the standing -laden with its and the small swept with and , is thus named among the acknowledged sources of the later -based style. He is set apart from the schools of his own age less by any borrowed comparison than by his own grounded features, the quiet , the standing and the subdued that together carry the archaic air.
For the collector, Aritsuna is among the rarest names a Hoki student could hope to encounter. The reference texts place him in the Toko Taikan but record no Fujishiro grade, and there is no National Treasure or among the work on record. His two Important Cultural Properties are held as patrimony, a signed preserved at Oyamazumi Jinja on the inland sea, long the great repository of early sword dedications, and a second in the Tokyo Museum. Beyond these the official record runs to a small handful of blades, three in all, the works in which his hand is read, with no provenance to houses recorded among them. A privately held Aritsuna is therefore a thing seen only rarely, and a signed one rarer still; when one does come before a collector it is a landmark, one of the few honest ways to hold the old Hoki manner from which the tradition drew its ideal.