A of the eleventh session, signed only with the two characters Masanobu and assigned in the published record to the Yamamura group of Echigo, opens onto one of the more thinly recorded provincial offshoots of the manner. Yamamura Masanobu was a smith of that group, which took its name from the Yamamura district near Takada in Echigo, the holding of a powerful local warrior house. The commonly held account, set down in the published sources, is that the family invited the line from Kyoto, the second or the third generation by varying tellings, into Echigo and learned its methods, and what most convinces of the tradition is that the surviving work so closely resembles 's own. Of this hand only a small number of pieces survive, bearing signatures such as Yamamura-ju , Masanobu and Yasunobu, and the name Masanobu was not one man's alone but is recorded in the sword-reference compendia for several smiths from the period into the early . His whole designated record is , and of the signed survivors the published sources judge there may be no more than two, observing of the eleventh-session blade that the extant signed works of this hand are probably limited to these two pieces alone (同作の現存する有銘作は恐らくこの二口のみではなかろうか).
The constant by which his hand is known is the . It is an interwoven with a flowing that tends to stand, thick gathering on it and entering well, and it is on this steel that a faint or a whitish cast appears. On the signed eleventh-session the flows and stands with and a whitish surface; on the broad blade of the thirty-first session the is tight, mixing a flowing tendency toward the edge, the thick and the fine. The published sources rest the attribution on exactly this , finding in the blade of the fifty-ninth session a and that clearly express the characteristic manner of the Yamamura group, which drew on the lineage of (信国の流れを汲む山村派の特色をよく現わしている), and praising the forging that interweaves while relying upon . It is the standing flowing steel, not a single temper pattern, that carries the back to him.
Over that the divides into two registers the texts draw expressly along the signature status of the blade. On the signed two-character pieces the temper is a or a mixed with , small entering and adhering, the work quiet and bearing a Kyoto flavor; the twenty-first-session is read as a piece carrying that Kyoto cast (京風を帯びたものであり), excellent in both and and moreover a rare thing, and the published sources call it for that reason a rarity (地刃の出来が優れており、且つ珍品である). On the blades attributed to him the temper grows more active: a base or a -toned pattern mixed with and , in places turning boxy, the edge fraying into , deep forming in the with well-working , running, and slight and seen, the bright. Across both registers the runs or shallow into , at times with an tendency, the on the signed blade turning back somewhat long.
The confirm the school as surely as the steel. On the thirty-first-session a Gyo-style is cut on the with a run off on the , and the published sources note that the carving too is of the manner and skillfully done (倶利迦羅の彫物も信国流で巧みである). The eleventh-session blade carries a finished kaki-nagashi on the and paired cut through on the , the groove there altered, the text notes, from an original or . These are not incidental ornaments but a continuation of the Yamashiro repertoire carried north, the iconography of the parent school worked by a provincial hand. The signatures themselves are a bare niji-, the two characters Masanobu cut at the center of an , on the twenty-first-session blade running into and crossing the .
What distinguishes Masanobu within his small body of work is the way the Kyoto inheritance and the northern setting meet in one hand. The signed blades keep the calm and the Kyoto flavor of the line he is said to have studied under, while the attributed pieces show the showier side of the manner, the breaking into with abundant and the gathering small with a bright . His bright, frayed and his standing -rich steel are what set the group apart and tie it back to its source, and on the strongest of the blades the published sources find a work that ranks higher in both workmanship and presumed period within the Yamamura group (山村派の中でも作位・年代共に上がるものであり), so that the attribution to Yamamura Masanobu is readily accepted (山村正信の極めが首肯され) and the date set to the era. The group founded no long-running independent tradition; its importance lies in carrying the Yamashiro- idiom into Echigo, and Masanobu is the name by which that transmission is best known.
Fujishiro grades him Jo , and the Toko Taikan values his work at the middle of its range. Four designated works stand on the official record, all of them and all of them , two cut with the two-character Masanobu signature and two attributed as Yamamura Masanobu. His record carries no National Treasure, no Important Cultural Property and no , so the question of patrimony held permanently beyond the market does not arise, and no house or museum is recorded as having held these blades. What a collector may realistically encounter is one of this small, even group of , signed or attributed, appearing only from time to time and a notable occasion when one does, for the signed pieces in particular the published sources count among the rarest survivals of the hand. A verified two-character Masanobu is, on the texts' own reckoning of perhaps two such blades, among the scarcer things a student of the provincial schools could meet, and the four designated works together give an exact measure of the level the published sources credit to the Yamamura group that carried the manner into Echigo.