Only one of Sanekage's signatures carries a date, and it settles almost everything known about him: a inscribed Fujiwara Sanekage on the and Joji 6, second month on the , the year 1367, a blade that became an Important Cultural Property and that fixes both his province and his period. Sanekage worked in in the years, and the published sources count him in the line of Norishige, the smith who had carried the tradition north out of a generation or two before. They transmit him as Norishige's pupil who later moved to , but they qualify the link on the dates: Norishige's own signed works fall in the Showa and Gen'o eras at the end of the period, while Sanekage signs Joji, two reigns later. The gap is too wide for direct discipleship, and the judges read the connection as an inherited manner rather than a master-and-student bond, a smith who took up the Norishige hand at one or two removes and made it the leading - style of his province.
His is a -laden hand built on a standing . Over a forging of , often mixed with and large grain, the surface stands out rather than lying flat, with thick gathered on it and entering well, the dark lines of steel that mark the Norishige descent. Onto that he sets a mixed with , the strong and deep, and through the temper run long , often layered several deep, with breaking through, fraying the , and and scattered along it. The turns in with frequent , finishing in a small round or sweeping to a point. It is the activity that the published sources keep naming as his tell, and they describe one greatly shortened as showing 「則重に直結する出来を示している」, workmanship connecting directly to Norishige.
The is where his province speaks. The steel runs dark, whitish in the grain over a blackened underlying tone, a color the judges name again and again as a northern-country feeling. It is the half-step that separates him from his model: his does not stand as strongly as Norishige's, and against the work of the homeland the judges find his blade wanting in clarity, writing of one that 「相州本国の作に比してはどこか野趣が感じられる」, that compared with the works of the heartland a certain rusticity is felt in it. That rusticity is not a fault in their account but a fingerprint. The commentary that calls his manner 「いわゆる則重風を見せている」, showing the so-called Norishige style, sets it down as the work of a country hand who inherited a great tradition and kept its vigor while losing its polish.
Two registers run through his record. The great body of it is the , blades shortened from longer , shallow in , the a or an , attributed to him from the and alone. Against these stand his rare signed pieces, all and a single , and slightly , the long four- and five-character signatures cut with a fine chisel, several carrying devotional carving, with or with at the base. A few of the signed are tempered instead in a purely executed narrow with , the calm manner that sits beside his more flamboyant work. From the signatures themselves the judges separate generations: a first hand who signs finely and dates to Joji, and a second-generation Fujiwara Sanekage cut with a thicker chisel, judged a skilled smith second only to the first, so the one name probably spans more than a single lifetime.
What sets Sanekage apart is exactly the distance the published sources measure between him and Norishige. He is held to the master by the standing , the thick , the and the -laden , and he is held away from him by the darker steel and the northern cast, the rusticity that the heartland work does not have. The published commentary on his Important Cultural Property draws the balance plainly, naming in it 「則重伝を継承した加州真景の特色」, the features of Kashu Sanekage as an inheritor of the Norishige tradition. He is not the source of that tradition but its provincial continuation, the hand through which the - of Norishige became the -based style of .
For the collector Sanekage is a rare and well-defined northern name. Fujishiro grades him Jo-jo . He has no National Treasures; his record runs through one Important Cultural Property, the Joji 6 , and through the and tiers, where forty-seven of his blades are recorded across many sessions, one greatly shortened reaching the . The dated , the judges note, is of exceptionally high documentary value because so few signed works survive, and his manner is rich in 「野趣に富み、覇気に溢れる作域」, a workmanship full of rustic spirit and martial energy. His blades carry provenance to the Maeda, the lords of his own province of , with the dated recorded in the Maeda Toshinari collection, and to the Nakagawa house. Signed Sanekage is among the scarcer things a collector of - might hope to meet, the coming to light from time to time and a dated signature only very rarely, a document of how the Norishige tradition lived on in the north.