Only one of Sanekage's signatures carries a date, and it settles almost everything known about him: a hira-zukuri tanto inscribed Fujiwara Sanekage on the omote and Joji 6, second month on the ura, the year 1367, a blade that became an Important Cultural Property and that fixes both his province and his period. Sanekage worked in Kaga in the Nanbokucho years, and the published sources count him in the line of Etchu Norishige, the smith who had carried the Soshu tradition north out of Sagami a generation or two before. They transmit him as Norishige's pupil who later moved to Kaga, 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 Kamakura 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 Soshu-den style of his province.
His is a nie-laden hand built on a standing itame. Over a forging of itame, often mixed with mokume and large grain, the surface stands out rather than lying flat, with thick ji-nie gathered on it and chikei entering well, the dark lines of steel that mark the Norishige descent. Onto that jigane he sets a notare mixed with gunome, the nie strong and deep, and through the temper run long sunagashi, often layered several deep, with kinsuji breaking through, hotsure fraying the habuchi, and uchinoke and yubashiri scattered along it. The boshi turns in midare-komi with frequent hakikake, finishing in a small round or sweeping to a yakizume point. It is the activity that the published sources keep naming as his tell, and they describe one greatly shortened katana as showing 「則重に直結する出来を示している」[[c:1]], workmanship connecting directly to Norishige.
The jigane 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 itame does not stand as strongly as Norishige's, and against the work of the Sagami homeland the judges find his blade wanting in clarity, writing of one katana that 「相州本国の作に比してはどこか野趣が感じられる」[[c:2]], that compared with the works of the Soshu heartland a certain rusticity is felt in it. That rusticity is not a fault in their account but a fingerprint. The same commentary that calls his manner 「いわゆる則重風を見せている」[[c:3]], 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 o-suriage mumei katana, shinogi-zukuri blades shortened from longer Nanbokucho tachi, shallow in sori, the kissaki a chu-kissaki or an o-kissaki, attributed to him from the ji and ha alone. Against these stand his rare signed pieces, all tanto and a single wakizashi, hira-zukuri and slightly sun-nobi, the long four- and five-character signatures cut with a fine chisel, several carrying devotional carving, bonji with suken or with gomabashi at the base. A few of the signed tanto are tempered instead in a purely executed narrow suguha with ko-ashi, the calm manner that sits beside his more flamboyant nie 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 Etchu master by the standing hada, the thick ji-nie, the chikei and the nie-laden notare, 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 tanto draws the balance plainly, naming in it 「則重伝を継承した加州真景の特色」[[c:4]], 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 Soshu-den of Norishige became the nie-based style of Kaga.
For the collector Sanekage is a rare and well-defined northern name. Fujishiro grades him Jo-jo saku. He has no National Treasures; his record runs through one Important Cultural Property, the Joji 6 tanto, and through the Tokubetsu Juyo and Juyo tiers, where forty-seven of his blades are recorded across many sessions, one greatly shortened katana reaching the Tokubetsu Juyo. The dated tanto, 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」[[c:5]], a workmanship full of rustic spirit and martial energy. His blades carry provenance to the Maeda, the lords of his own province of Kaga, with the dated tanto recorded in the Maeda Toshinari collection, and to the Nakagawa house. Signed Sanekage is among the scarcer things a collector of Soshu-den might hope to meet, the mumei katana 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.
