Life and times

Where he came from

• Sesko records two theories. One has him come from the Senjuin or Taima schools of Yamato, and explains the name Hasebe by Hase. The other makes him a son or relative of Shintōgo Kunimitsu, who used the surname Hasebe.
• The NBTHK, in issue 808 of its journal, recalls that the 光山押形 (Kōzan oshigata) shows tangs by Shintōgo Kunimitsu and by Kunihiro with the name Hasebe, and that the Kanchi'in-bon mentions a Tōma group in Yamato. Today the prevailing view is that the Hasebe were not from Kyoto but from Yamato: they learned in Sōshū and ended up in Kyoto.
• The biographical dictionary 日本人名大辞典 (Nihon jinmei daijiten) says that he learned under Masamune in Kamakura, that he is counted among his ten pupils (正宗十哲, Masamune jittetsu) and that around the Kenmu era (1334–1338) he lived in Gojō Bōmon Inokuma, in Kyoto.

In Kyoto

According to the treatise Kotō meizukushi, cited by Sesko, the first Kunishige was the son of Senjuin Shigenobu, was born in 1270, worked in Kyoto from the Ryakuō era (1338–1342) and died in 1347, aged 78. Sesko supports this only in part: after the fall of Kamakura, in 1333, most of the Sōshū masters left, Kunishige to Kyoto among them, and only Hiromitsu and Akihiro stayed there. As his own hypothesis, he proposes that the first was born in 1313 and lived until 1371.

The NBTHK suggests that Kunishige, with work dated 1355 and 1358, may have been the elder brother of Kuninobu, another smith of the school.

The generations

• The meikan give three: the first around Kenmu (1334–1338), the second around Enbun (1356–1361) and the third, Rokurōzaemon, around Ōei (1394–1428). Honma follows the three; Tanobe and Fujishiro count the Kenmu and the Enbun smith as a single smith, and Rokurōzaemon as the second.
• According to the 日本人名大辞典 (Nihon jinmei daijiten), the third supposedly moved to Tennōji, in Settsu.

The dates of his blades