When the great masters had passed and the country slid into the wars of the late , a residual held on in under a new patron. The Later Hojo, ruling from Odawara castle, kept smiths at hand, and it was from this orbit that the leading name of the window emerged: Tsunahiro, transmitted as a retained smith of the Odawara Hojo who took the character from Hojo Ujitsuna. The first generation's earliest dated works fall in the Tenbun era, and the line runs forward in the conventional reckoning through Tensho, Keicho, Kan'ei, and Manji, the third generation drawn west to Tsugaru by Tamenobu to forge before returning home. Around him stood a wider population working the same idiom: Hirotsugu of , whose strongest hands cluster near the Meio and Tenbun years; Hiromasa and Soso, names carried across several indistinct generations; Masahiro, reaching back toward ; and the Odawara group of Yasuharu, Yasukuni, and Fusamune, the last praised above all for his carving. These smiths inherited the manner of the apex at a remove of generations rather than by direct descent from the mainline of Masamune and Sadamune.
The signature of the phase is the open declaration of the full temper. The forging stays mixed with , the grain inclined to stand (), with and ; over it the smiths ran a -and- ground that climbs the upper half into , and firing across and , and threading the . This is the and learned from Hiromitsu and Akihiro, but pushed toward display: the Hirotsugu of the 61st runs its temper so high it reaches the , mixing , , and into a demonstrative pattern. The contrast with the classic apex is precise and the appraisers mark it. Where Masamune raised to its deepest refinement over a bright, clear steel, the tends to , a whitish cast standing in for that clarity, and the inclines to , a sunken or subdued quality rather than depth. The 238th Jubi record states the point plainly for the first-generation Tsunahiro: the and carry abundant , yet the very shape of the departs from that of Hiromitsu and Akihiro. The temper is broader and busier across the surface, but it lacks the quiet command and the leaping interior activity of the original.
To the window is to separate this demonstrative late temper from the classic it imitates: a standing with , a wide worked with and crescent , a that sinks rather than deepens, and signatures reading -ju with full given names rather than the of the great forebears. The named hands carry the distinctions, Fusamune through his dense, precise of and , Tsunahiro through his crescent and high fire, Hirotsugu through a vigorous enough to recall Hasebe. Provenance keeps these blades close to power: several are recorded in Honma's inventory of the Imperial collection, one bearing the ownership inscription of Akimoto Yoshihide of Kozuke, another the invocation of a Sengoku warrior, the Tsunahiro commission tied by its dated to the Tsugaru house.