The steel is the first thing one learns to read in work: a kneaded so tight that the surface takes on the pear-skin sheen the texts name , the dusted over it fine and even, slender threading through, the whole carrying a moist luster (潤い) and a clarity that recurs in notice after notice. This is the steel of the early Yamashiro tradition at its summit. The forge stood at the foot of the slope in Kyoto, on the highway running toward Omi, and a community of smiths already worked there by the early period; the tale collection Uji Shui Monogatari attests their presence, so this is a house with a documented place in the literature of its own century. The school is conventionally founded on the six brothers, Kunitomo the eldest, then Hisakuni, Kuniyasu, Kunikiyo, Arikuni and Kunitsuna, sons of the founder Kunika (also given as Kuniie). Kunitomo, Hisakuni and Kuniyasu were summoned as to forge on rotation at the cloistered court of the Retired Emperor Go-Toba, and Hisakuni is even transmitted as a teacher to the sovereign; that imperial patronage is the reason a slender with so quiet a temper carries the authority it does.
What binds the house across four generations is restraint married to refinement. Over the the brothers set a calm leaning into a shallow , mixed with , and , the tight and bright, and entering, and running within the ; the turns in a refined that very often sweeps with . This is the opposite pole from the clove-flower flamboyance of contemporary , an edge whose interest lies in the activity within rather than the height of the pattern. Within that shared vocabulary the members are told apart by habit. Kunitomo and Kuniyasu hold to the compressed of the founding generation, their clouding into ; Kuniyasu's linked picks him out alone within the school. Kunitsuna is the divergence, a robust standing prominently over thick , with conspicuously strong that leans toward the manner about to be born. The later course runs through Norikuni, the bridge generation, into the age of Kuniyoshi and Yoshimitsu, where the temper settles into bright in fine . Kuniyoshi's tell is the , the doubled (at times trebled) line along the ; Yoshimitsu's is the linear dropping of into the beneath the , his a narrow under a bright .
For the collector the school divides into work that can be studied and work that can be owned. Its summit, Toshiro Yoshimitsu, crowns the close of the line; paired with Kunimitsu of as a master of the and a virtuoso of , and ranked in the period with Masamune and Go among the Three Great Works under Heaven, he is a smith met in the great collections rather than possessed, his signed the standard against which every attribution is measured. His teacher Kuniyoshi, whose the texts name outright, is by measure not wholly beyond reach, his anchored on the doubled line. The house also seeded the eastern tradition: Kunitsuna's transmitted descent runs on to Kunimitsu, the de facto founder of , whose own refined steel passes for until the and betray it, and from whose quiet -laden Yukimitsu, Masamune and Norishige drew the - of the mature tradition. The refined - the brothers fixed was likewise the wellspring the masters drew from, the two hands sitting so close in the eye that gold-inlaid attributions appear on blades grouped with Hisakuni. To an blade is to read the pear-skin steel first, then the quiet -laden , then the swept , and to know which brother or pupil the habits name; to acquire one, of any generation, is among the scarcest encounters early Yamashiro affords.