A dated Daiei 3 (1523), made in the smith's fifty-seventh year and signed in full as no resident, Yosozaemon no Jo Sukesada, descends in the Hachisuka family and was raised to . Sukesada is less a man than a house. The name belongs to the forges of the late that scholars group as , and of these the published sources say plainly that "the most prosperous was the Sukesada family". The early reference Hayami-dashi, the published commentary notes, "lists as many as twenty-one smiths who add a personal name to the signature". Within that crowd one branch stands first, the Yosozaemon no Jo line. Its first generation was born in Onin 1, by back-count from a inscribed as made at seventy-one in Tenbun 6. The published record states the ranking directly: "among them, the one who styles himself Yosozaemon no Jo is the most famous, and the most skilled".
His characteristic hand is the temper the late workshops made their own. The body carries an open-waisted built into a double-structured , the -, mixed with - and pointed . and enter richly, the tends to tighten, adheres, and small are scattered with the bright. The published sources name "the double-structured particular to " as the mark of his typical work. Of one late work in this manner they write that it is "a typical work among blades, and among works of the same hand the most excellent representative example". The wide, complex line answers the broad and of the late- on which it most often appears.
The is the foil to that animated edge. It is a forged tight and well packed, fine laid over it like dust and fine woven through. On a number of signed pieces a faint rises toward the , and one carries a . The most often runs into a small round or enters as a , slightly pointed, with and a turnback that runs a little long. Across his blades the activity is carried in abundant and , with and frequent, the temper deep in and .
Beyond the double-structured he commands two further registers. One is the flamboyant face, a temper that climbs into full with and . The published sources note that is apt to lack refinement, yet single out his examples as well made, and one is a collaboration signed jointly with Genbei no Jo Sukesada and dated in the Tenbun era. The other is the calm face, the and , broad and shallowly undulating, at times mixed with . Of these the commentary remarks that "even when he tempers a he is skilled", and elsewhere that he is "a master among the smiths, skilled alike in and in ". One blade sets double-structured at the and the and bridges the span between with , a the judges call unusual.
Beneath all this sits the chronology of the name itself. The published sources record that "there were two generations of the same name, with the change from the first to the second during the last years of Tenbun", and Honma, in his inventory of the Imperial collection, likewise counts two Yosozaemon, the first dated in Eisho and Tenbun and the second in Eiroku and Tensho, noting that the Daiei 3 signs with the so-called four-stroke (四つ与) and the Daiei 5 with the one-stroke (一与). A body of blades carries the Sukesada name with no personal name at all, judged to the house by period and quality. Within his school he is set apart by his own traits: the bright, well-packed , the faint and the wide, double-structured distinguish him from the plainer mass of late- production. His finest dated are read as representative of as a whole, not of Sukesada alone, and his hand is the standard against which the school's unsigned blades are measured.
For the collector Yosozaemon no Jo Sukesada is a great name that remains attainable in a way the masters are not, though never common at the top. Fujishiro grades the first generation Jo-jo , and the Toko Taikan values his work at 1,000 yen. He has no National Treasures. His record runs through one Important Cultural Property and one blade among sixty-two , with a further file of prewar . These reach the market only rarely, and a notable event when one does. His blades are held in long-held collections and houses grounded in their own provenance. The is described as "a blade of excellent workmanship handed down in the Hachisuka family", and the Mori, Ii and Shonai Sakai houses appear among the recorded provenance of others. Two more of his blades, a Daiei 3 in and a Daiei 5 that breaks into , are recorded in Honma's inventory of the Imperial collection. A signed and dated Yosozaemon Sukesada, broad and bright, with the open-waisted reading clearly down its edge, is the late- blade a serious collector can realistically hope to encounter.