A on this record signed Tsushima Nyudo Tachibana Tsunemitsu and dated Genroku 11 (1698) gives the smith's age as seventy-three, and from that one inscription his long working life can be reckoned back to a birth around 'ei 3. Tsunemitsu was surnamed Hioki, used the common name Ichinojo and later styled himself Saburozaemon, and was born in Gamo District of Omi Province. He belonged to the Ishido line, the early- school that set out to revive the clove-flower of old and , complete with the the medieval masters had carried in their steel. With Dewa no Kami Mitsuhira and no Kami Munehiro he went up from Omi to Kyoto and afterward down to , where these makers became known as the Ishido. He took the Tachibana name where Mitsuhira used Minamoto, and the published sources name him, with Mitsuhira, a representative smith of the Ishido group (江戸石堂を代表する刀工).
His hand is a single flamboyant manner held at full power across every blade on record. Over a tightly forged , often a well-packed mixing and a little , he tempers a crowded with double-flower , large and small , round-headed , and small , with pointed elements set among them, so the temper line shows pronounced height as it crests and falls. and enter in profusion and the work turns showy, -dominant with attached , fine running through and appearing here and there. The published sources call one such a work in which his true strengths are fully realized (常光の本領が発揮された一口) and another, of large-pattern with and entering thickly, the piece that should be regarded as his finest (常光の最高傑作というべき作品). The dense, height-varied clove temper, not the bare clove root that every -descended smith shares, is what makes his his own.
The beneath is the surer half of the recognition. It is a well-forged , on his calmer pieces a that packs down finely, carrying that gathers in minute particles, and across it stands a . on a new-sword blade is rare and deliberate, and its recovery was the Ishido school's whole purpose, so a flamboyant standing over a clear irregular reflection is the first thing that separates an Ishido from any other . The published sources describe the reflection in his most vivid pieces as standing brilliantly (乱れ映りも鮮やかに立ち), the clove temper bright above it. The enters and turns back in , at times running straight on the with a constriction at the point, occasionally with a little ; the is the broad mid- , wide in with a noticeable taper, thick in , the sometimes compact and sometimes tending to extend.
The published sources draw him not as a sequence of style periods but as one accomplished manner, and the only axis they trace is read off the . The is , the signature cut centrally below the in a large, thickly chiseled six-character , with a long full signature and date on the most completely inscribed pieces. Some of the works carry the title Tsushima no Jo and others Tsushima no Kami, and a minority view has held the Tsushima no Jo blades to be a separate second generation. The judges rather find that in the overall tone of the inscription and the manner of chisel work the Tsushima no Jo signatures share much with the Tsushima no Kami ones, and prefer to read the former as works made before he received the higher Tsushima no Kami rank, one such viewed as a piece made prior to that promotion (対馬守受領前の作とみたい), the matter left open for new evidence. The signature thus carries the only temporal information in an oeuvre whose hand does not otherwise change, and a related question hangs over his very kinship: he was long held to be Mitsuhira's elder brother, but extant dated signatures, calculated backward, show Mitsuhira the elder by six years, and the difference of Tachibana against Minamoto has brought even the brother theory into doubt.
Within the Ishido group Tsunemitsu and Mitsuhira are the two by whom the branch is known, and what sets Tsunemitsu apart is grounded in his own steel rather than in any borrowed comparison. His bright, height-varied with and his standing are the features the judges return to, and the recurring verdict is that his work recalls the old of classical times, described on the of the fiftieth and thirty-fourth sessions as bringing old to mind (古作一文字を髣髴とさせる) and on the twenty-second session piece as calling it vividly to memory (古作一文字を彷彿させる). That recovered idiom, tempered in new-sword steel and carried on an the medieval smiths would have recognized, is the manner the branch is remembered for, and one is singled out simply as a typical work that clearly displays his distinctive characteristics (常光の特色がよく示された典型作). Where the Tsushima no Jo and Tsushima no Kami generation debate, if ever resolved toward two hands, would extend his line, the published sources keep it as one hand whose signature alone moved with his rank.
For the collector Tsunemitsu is a first-rank name of the Ishido, and Fujishiro grades him Jo . He has no National Treasures and no Important Cultural Properties; his record on this account runs entirely through the tier, where seven of his works are held, every one of them an , signed or cut with the large six-character , several carrying dates across the , Enpo and Genroku years that make the chronology of his long career legible. None of the seven carries a recorded former owner, so no provenance or holding institution can honestly be named for them; what can be said is that they are designated works held in public and long-private collections, more often kept than traded. A signed Tsunemitsu of his flamboyant manner is among the more attainable of the Ishido swords precisely because so much of his record sits in the tradeable tier rather than locked as national heritage, yet a fine one reaches the market only from time to time and with patience, and a dated showing the bright over a standing remains a substantial acquisition, a document of how the Ishido brought the old clove back to life in a blade.