The school (大宮) of traces its name and its blood to Kyoto, not to the heartland where it eventually settled. The published sources follow the line back to a remote ancestor, Kunimori, who is said to have left Inokuma in Yamashiro province and moved into during the period, around the Bun'o years. With him the group carried a Yamashiro sensibility into the province of , and that transplanted origin remains the key to everything the school later became. Works by the earliest hands, Kunimori and Sukemori, survive in extremely small numbers, so the line first comes clearly into view at the close of the period and then flowers through the height of the era. Several names recur across these generations, among them Morishige, whose name passed down successive smiths from the late into the period; but the figure who left by far the largest body of work, and the highest reputation, is Morikage, who worked at and cut long, dated signatures such as Bishu Morikage across the , Joji, Eiwa and Kakei years.
What binds these smiths into a recognizable group is a particular blend, a temper that reads as Soden- yet is built differently from the clove-flower of mainstream . The is the constant beneath the range: a standing mixed with , the grain tending to open, with fine , entering, patches of in the steel, and a that rises on signed and blades alike. Upon that ground the school sets a in which , and an angular, pointed tendency intermingle, with and entering well, deepening to , and fine and running through the . The recurring tells are a Yamashiro-tinged carrying that strong , and a running to a small round or a pointed turnback with . Within this shared vocabulary the hands diverge. Morikage tends to a base with somewhat angular crests and a subdued, rather than a showy temper, while his range stretches from that quiet register to a the commentary likens to and the Unrui smiths. Morishige favors a bold, opened-waist , the koshi-hiraki pattern mixed with into flamboyant undulations. The breadth itself is a school trait, the published sources describing the -iki as wide, taking in -dominant work, florid - , angular , and the -manner at its quiet edge.
To an blade is to read this fusion of Yamashiro- refinement and - flamboyance, then to separate it from its larger neighbors. The bright and the -strong hold the school apart from Kanemitsu, whose temper undulates more broadly, and from the box-shaped large of Chogi, though the kinship to Chogi is real and acknowledged in the commentary, which places Morikage's workmanship beside it. The school is often overshadowed by those two names, which makes the distinguishing read the more useful: the standing with its , the angular pointed elements, and the comparatively restrained . Morikage stands at the front rank of Soden- and carries a Jo-jo grade in Fujishiro; his provenance runs through the houses, the Nabeshima of , the Uesugi, the Date and the Hisamatsu-Matsudaira, with a piece recorded in Imperial keeping. A modern scholarly question hangs over the name itself, the published sources recording a theory, now widely entertained, that the long-signature Morikage may belong to an collateral line connected to Chikakage and Yoshikage, and that the smiths who cut bold, large two-character signatures may be the true hands; the matter is left open. By the late the distinctive traits fade, the Shinkuro generation of Morishige showing no difference from the general type, evidence that the subsidiary line was at last absorbed into the dominant school, a trajectory that gives the group its documentary value for the study of how 's lesser lineages were drawn into the mainstream.