Kawachi no Kami Kunisuke is an Osaka name carried by two hands, and the published sources keep the two carefully apart. The first generation went up to Kyoto and entered the school of Kunihiro as a late disciple; when Kunihiro died in Keichō 19 he moved to Ōsaka together with Izumi no Kami Kunisada, the elder Kunisada, and the two became pioneers of the Ōsaka tradition. He was, by tradition, from Kanbe in Province and of Ishidō descent, and the published record makes that descent the key to his hand: among Kunihiro's pupils he was, in their words, the one who 'most excelled at ', so that some trace of clove pattern always surfaces somewhere within his irregular temper. Several of the entries judge from his style and the manner of his signature that his real teacher in practice was the senior fellow-disciple Echigo no Kami Kunitomo, rather than Kunihiro alone.
His recognized hand is a of standard width with shallow and a , forged in a tightly packed with abundant . From a straight at the base the temper opens into a mixed with and a small , deep in with well adhered, and entering, and running through, the turning into a . The prominence of clove within the is the very point on which the appraisal turns: where another blade might pass without a name, the published sources note that within the group the conspicuous is what marks the work as Kunisuke's. His manner stands extremely close to that of the elder Kunisada with whom he came south, the two reading as companions of one Ōsaka beginning.
The is where the second register declares itself. On a number of his blades, and most plainly on his , the stands and turns , the loose rustic of his master Kunihiro's school carried into Ōsaka, with thick and . Over that the temper centres on a mixed with , the deep within the edge, running well and entering, with appearing at times. One the published sources read as 'a style of strong colour', the standing and the -laden an accomplished demonstration of what he learned; a relief with a companion groove and, on his finest blades, goma-bashi carving accompany this manner. This is the hand of a pupil who never quite set down the Ishidō clove he was born to.
The second generation, son of the first and known to the world as Naka-Kawachi, turns the other way. He forges a tightly knit, beautiful and tempers a flamboyant clove centred on his own fist-shaped , mixed with and varied so as never to fall into monotony, often opening from a long straight , the tight, bright and clear, the to . The published sources call this 'the Ishidō house's own ' and note that the manner of his father is scarcely seen in it; his forte, they say, 'lies in a of fist-shaped clove, the well-ordered, beautiful its point of appreciation'. His work was 'praised as a ' in its own day, and the sources add, with candour, that some pieces tempered motifs such as Mount or jewels and ran too far into technical display.
What separates the line from its neighbours is exactly what the judges name. Set against the Tsuda smiths, who tempered the brilliant billowing tōran, Naka-Kawachi stood as a standard-bearer of the Ishidō lineage's original clove, his bright, fist-shaped over a beautifully ordered the counter to that wave. The first generation, for his part, is distinguished within his own school by his clove rather than against it, the one pupil whose carries the old -derived clove of the Ishidō stock somewhere inside it. Father and son thus close the name from both sides: the a hand who kept the Ishidō clove, the nidai an Ishidō hand who put the manner down.
For the collector Kunisuke is one of the leading Ōsaka names, graded Jō-jō by Fujishiro. He has no National Treasures and no Important Cultural Properties; his record runs instead through the rank, forty-eight blades across the two generations, with one carried in the prewar Jūyō Bijutsuhin, and the published commentary calls the 's finest signed work 'the outstanding one among his works'. Provenance is recorded for only a few: the Itakura house and the Imperial Family appear among the holders of his blades, the rest in private hands of unrecorded whereabouts. Extant works by the are comparatively few, especially scarce, while Naka-Kawachi's survive in rather greater number. Only a handful fall in the tradeable tiers at any one time, so a signed Kawachi no Kami Kunisuke comes to market only from time to time, a well-made example of either generation a satisfying thing for a collector of Ōsaka to encounter and hold.