Within the province of , in the decades of the period, a body of smiths gathered at Naoe carrying forward the manner of Saburo Kaneuji, and from that locality they took the name Naoe . Kaneuji, originally a member of the Yamato group who studied under Masamune of and is counted among the Ten Disciples of Masamune (Masamune jittetsu), settled first at in and established a flourishing school. His pupils and successors, among them Kanetomo, Kanetsugu, Kaneshige, and Kanenobu, relocated within the province to Naoe and forged there, and the smiths of that group are collectively termed Naoe to distinguish them from proper, which signifies Kaneuji himself. The lineage is in essence the second generation of the line, the - of Masamune received through Kaneuji and translated into the steel and temper of ; the name ran on across several generations into the , so that the reference works list more than one Kanetomo, around the era and again around Oei, while the core production falls in the Kanno, Enbun, Joji, and years of the middle fourteenth century, anchored by the few signed and dated pieces such as a Kanno-dated by Kanetsugu.
The shared vocabulary of the school is the manner rendered in . The forging is mixed with and , frequently flowing toward and standing at times into , over which thick settles and enter well, the dark grain-lines threading a steel that is clear and legible; the - a smith would carry is absent, the speaking instead through the depth of its . The is a - crossed with the pointed of -, and tempered in or , often showing a -tendency, with and entering and uchi-noke, , and along the ; through the temper run and in profusion, the streaming -lines and bright lightning-lines that are the school's surest sign, the deep and brightening at the best examples into something clear and lucid. The answers the in or , turning in a or sweeping into , the point frequently brushed with . Within this common ground the hands separate. Kanetomo is read by the linking of round-headed in sequence, calm and elegant in the the sources hold him most proficient in; Kanetsugu inclines toward the -slanted and with a more powerful, compelling ; Tametsugu, a Norishige hand resettled inland rather than a direct Naoe smith, carries a larger, more billowing over a steel that darkens, a manner the commentary holds to differ from and Kaneshige. Set against Kaneuji himself, the Naoe smiths work in a milder, more workmanlike register, the standing less strongly and the fewer than in the master whose manner most closely approaches Masamune.
To a Naoe blade is to read the activity through a frame, distinguishing it above from proper, whose forging stands and brightens more vigorously and whose and carry the higher character, and below from the later , whose harden into a drier, more regular tooth without the deep and the run of and ; a blade with a whitish tone, by contrast, reads away from the line entirely, toward the Zenjo hands who also bore these names. The strongest members, Kanetomo and Kanetsugu above all, hold their place in the register, their signed and designated Important Art Objects serving as the documentary spine against which the unsigned majority is measured. For the body of the school survives and , broad and attributed by resemblance to those scarce signatures, so that signed examples are held exceptionally valuable and reach private hands only with patience. Provenance is thin but real, blades descending through the Naruse and Akaboshi collections, a pair preserved at Atsuta Jingu, and others held by the ; the typical encounter remains a attribution carrying the open Naoe and the streaming of a tradition the smiths of took from Masamune and made their own.