Working in at the opening of the age, Hankei (繁慶) was born in and bore the personal name Noda Zenshirō Kiyotaka (善四郎清堯), recorded in one entry as Noda Shirō Kiyotaka. The consistently relate that he first served the Tokugawa house as a gunsmith, a teppō-kaji or matchlock and gun-barrel maker, before turning to swordmaking after the death of Tokugawa Ieyasu in Genna 2 (1616), when he moved to and took up the new craft. His activity falls around the Keichō era, in the -into-early- span, and the registers place him in nearly the period as the first-generation Yasutsugu, so that he is counted among the pioneers of swordsmithing. One Jūyō-Bijutsuhin entry notes that the matchlock signed Kiyotaka (清堯) dated Keichō 17 (1612) and preserved at Hinomisaki Shrine carries the name he used before the swordsmith career; an early- register further records a tradition that his teacher may have been the first-generation Kotsugu, though it states the lineage is unclear.
Across the corpus the describe a single, recognizable hand. The is tending to large , frequently mixed with and , with the grain standing strongly and a slightly blackish tone to the steel; thick adheres and enter prominently, producing the texture the writers repeatedly name (and, in the older Jūyō-Bijutsuhin notes, ). The state that his professed ideal was () Masamune, while his actual - model was Norishige, an affinity confirmed by the construction and the steeply dropped . The is a base mixed with and , often widening into large-patterned , with and , deep , and thickly adhering that turns coarse and uneven () in places. , , and run long and frequently; and enter; and the tends toward , so that the boundary between and is not crisply demarcated. To recognize his work is to read this combination: standing with abundant , the Norishige-derived -laden , and the subdued, sinking .
For the direct attention beyond the blade surface to the and the maker's habits. They record deeply cut , a slender tang, file marks (with gyaku-ō-sujikai on the ) and (檜垣) on the , a two-character signature cut boldly with a carving chisel rather than an ordinary , and an unusual instance of the placed above the . Carving is rare in his oeuvre: one entry records that ranma- appears on only a single known blade, and that by his hand number just three examples seen by direct examination. is noted as exceptionally uncommon. The papers cite named provenance for transmitted pieces: a blade held in the Arima family, a from the Shimazu family with a late- , a sword passed in the Saijō Matsudaira family, and the votive matchlock-and-sword devotion to Hinomisaki Shrine in Izumo. Measured against Masamune as aspiration and Norishige as practice, the school's standing rests on this self-declared individuality, the and chisel-cut signature that mark a former gunsmith's transformation into one of 's founding swordsmiths.