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Childhood and apprenticeship
He was born in 1750 (Kan’en 3) in Nakayama, on Yonezawa land (Dewa), today the city of Nan’yō, in Yamagata, according to the Japanese Wikipedia; Kotobank makes him a native of Akayu, in the same city. Having lost his father, he was brought up with his mother in the house of Suzuki Gonjirō and then with the Toyama of Akayu, and at 18 he became apprenticed to a smith. He first signed Suzuki Saburō Takuhide (卓英) and, in Yamagata, Terukuni (英国). In 1771 (Meiwa 8) he entered the workshop of Shitahara Yoshihide (下原吉英) in Hachiōji, in Musashi.
In the service of the Akimoto
In 1774 (An’ei 3) Akimoto Nagatomo, lord of Yamagata, took him into his service, and he forged at the Akimoto smithy in their residence in Hamachō, in Edo. He then began to sign Masahide. A katana of 1798 in the Tokyo National Museum is signed 川部儀八郎藤原正秀 (Kawabe Gihachirō Fujiwara Masahide), with his monogram (花押, kaō).
The return to the old ways
Kotobank (Nipponica) relates that, influenced by the national studies (国学, kokugaku), he proclaimed that the Japanese sword had to return to that of the Kamakura and the Nanbokuchō, the theory of the return to the old ways (復古刀論, fukkotōron). He wrote the Tōken jitsuyōron (刀剣実用論), the Tōken bengi (刀剣弁疑), the Kenkō hidenshi (剣工秘伝志), the Tanren gyokkan (鍛錬玉函) and the Tōken buyōron (刀剣武用論). In them he revealed secrets of the craft, such as the mixing and spreading of the hardening clay; the metallurgist Tawara Kuniichi deduced from the Kenkō hidenshi that the swordsmith was to make his own steel to regulate the carbon, as the old masters did.
The Tokyo National Museum holds the Tōken bengi (刀劔弁疑) in three volumes, printed in Edo in 1817 (Bunka 14), by Suishinshi Masahide and Senbon Takayoshi; the National Diet Library, the manuscript Tōken wakumon (刀剣或問), which Masahide dictated. Sesko relates that, a great theorist, he drew on the writings of Bokuden, a student of Ōmura Kaboku, and himself tried the shin jūgomai kōbuse (真十五枚甲伏) forging method.
Pupils
He trained many swordsmiths: Kotobank names Taikei Naotane, who followed his doctrine above all in the Bizen tradition, and the Japanese Wikipedia makes Hosokawa Masayoshi a student of his. A documentary from Nan’yō speaks of more than a hundred pupils across the country. Today he is counted with Naotane and Minamoto Kiyomaro among the three great swordsmiths of Edo (江戸三作, Edo sansaku): the NBTHK brought the three together in its 2025 exhibition, on the bicentenary of his death.
The generations
In 1818 (Bunsei 1) he handed the name Masahide over to his son, the second, who worked a great deal with him, and signed 天秀 (Tenshū). He died in Edo on 7 November 1825 (Bunsei 8). Masatsugu (正次), adopted son of the second, never came to inherit the name, so the one called the fourth, active from Ansei to Keiō, was in practice the third.