Ishiguro Masaaki was a pupil of the first Ishiguro Masatsune, the founder of the Ishiguro school. He lived at Matsushita-chō in Kanda, , and took the Mokuensai (木鳶斎). The published sources record that he was born in Bunka 10 (1813) and was active into the Kaei and Meiji years; because he would have entered the school in Masatsune's last years, they conjecture that his practical teacher was the second Masatsune or Masayoshi. Within the school he is the gifted hand they set beside his fellow pupil Masayoshi, "a master spoken of as one of the twin pillars".
The Ishiguro manner, the sources write, gives direct expression to the taste of its age, a rich and pictorial world of birds and flowers worked in high relief and colour inlay. Masaaki follows it closely. He inherited the technique of the first Masatsune faithfully, and his drawing, "thoroughly from life", is called striking. His usual plate is with , at times with , carved in and set with and colour inlay in gold, silver, , and hiirodō. The chisel work is minute and the sense of colour outstanding, and on the the open space is left wide, a composition the sources trace to Masatsune, so that a clear and lucid air fills the field.
The subject he made his own is the pheasant and the golden pheasant. The house worked birds and flowers above all, and of Masaaki the sources write that "among his works on the pheasant and golden pheasant in particular, masterpieces are many". The pheasant appears on nine of the eighteen pieces in his designated record, the golden pheasant on nearly as many. He often sets out a parent-and-chick group, cock and hen with their chicks, in a drawing-from-life manner, upright and high in tone; on the the pheasant is paired with bamboo. On one the cock fills the face in vivid colour and the hen and chick sit in wide space on the reverse; the sources note that several of this composition exist and that this one is the finest for its state of preservation. A pair on sets parent pheasants among bamboo with gold, , and hiirodō inlay, and a three-piece set of the same subject is called a masterpiece of the smith and his school.
Around that subject run the other birds of the house. Pairs of peacocks among a hundred flowers appear on two sets, worked so densely that the sources call such crowding unusual in his work; where an ordinary craftsman would overdo it and fall into vulgarity, Masaaki keeps it refined and beautiful, without a trace of coarseness. A plum and bush warbler is carved from life in and colour on , and a hawk chasing sparrows on a and pair is praised for movement, the sources calling it a fine work in which the merits of the Ishiguro school are refined. The hawk is the subject they also name for Masatsune and Masayoshi; the pheasant pair is what sets Masaaki apart within the house.
The sources are not uncritical. On a plum-and-hawk set they find the weaker than the and , "cramped, and whatever the technique, lacking force". Elsewhere the judgment is consistent: careful , varied colour and a high polish of each technique. What marks his hand among his fellow pupils is a more splendid use of colour inlay, set within the bird-and-flower realism that the house made its own.
Masaaki's record stands on eighteen designations, , pairs, , two-piece sets and full sets of fittings, from the twenty-second session to the sixty-seventh. No provenance or institutional holder is recorded for them, and none stands above the rank. His work is therefore met in private collections, and a signed pheasant or set in good preservation is the piece that represents him best. Such work appears only from time to time, and a collector of bird-and-flower fittings looks for it with patience.