Among the lines that gathered in the orbit of late- -, the Motoshige school occupies a deliberately separate place. Its founder, Motoshige (元重), worked from around the Shōwa years (1316) into the Jōji era of the mid , a span the published sources read across a probable first and second generation whose boundary remains unsettled. The old genealogies hold the line distinct from Kanemitsu and Chōgi, deriving it instead from Moriie (the second-generation Moriie's son Morishige, in turn the father of Motoshige), and the early Ko-Motoshige hand carries two-character signatures cut with a thick chisel over file marks, sometimes connected by the commentary with and currents. Beside the founder stands Shigezane (重眞), recorded by tradition as the younger brother or pupil of the first Motoshige, his own dated work running from Karyaku (1327) into Enbun and likewise proposed across two generations. The two carry the separate descent through the , apart from both the mainline of Mitsutada and Nagamitsu and the houses beside them.
What binds the school is a shared and unusually angular vocabulary. Over a tone the smiths set squared , the aligned in a near-straight line, joined by whose asymmetric teeth slant toward the base; the whole leans , the reverse inclination the reads as "the point where the temperament is mixed in". Within the temper run and , the tending to a tight, slightly sunken gathered with , fine and threading the , and the turning back pointed. The forging is an mixed with , flowing grain and , standing somewhat across the surface with fine and , beneath which a rises, often vividly. Divergences are real and instructive: Motoshige's grandest widen toward an build, and a of Shimazu transmission grows extraordinarily strong in and ; Shigezane's steel can take a cold, bluish-black clarity, and a rare signed Enbun opens instead into a frank the commentary marks as "not in a Motoshige-like manner" (元重風ではなく).
To the school is to weigh that reverse temper against its base. A blade may at a rough glance read as , yet the angular teeth aligned at the and the standing return the appraisal to , a temperament wearing the air of neighboring . Against Kagemitsu, to whom the old books liken the manner, the wider , the pointed and the loosened flowing and mark "the individuality of a Motoshige whose line differs from that of Kagemitsu and his kind"; against the mainline of Mitsutada and Nagamitsu, the squared, slanting and the angular set the hand apart. Confusions cluster where the commentary itself hesitates: a may admit views of Unrui or Chikakage, the panel narrowing to Shigezane only on close reading of the whole with the detail of and . In standing, the founder sits among the few major names a collector can realistically hold, his work met most often as and carried in provenance through the Date, Satake, Uesugi, Shimazu, Hosokawa and Imperial houses; Shigezane is the scarcer signed name, his and dated pieces a foothold for study. tradition once counted Motoshige among the three sages of Sadamune, a claim the sources find hard to credit, since most of the school's surviving work is plainly , the squared and slanting declaring itself wherever a vivid runs beneath it.