is the Yamashiro master at the head of his school, a Kyoto smith of the Ryōkai line who worked through the period and, by tradition, carried the inheritance into the age of . The published sources record his descent in one sentence and then complicate it: he was a smith of the Ryōkai line who, they say, "is also said to have studied under Sadamune of ". From those two roots, the Yamashiro tradition and the study under Sadamune, the whole shape of his work follows. The earliest reliably dated pieces fall in the Enbun, Kōan and Jōji years; the 's older Kenmu date is set aside because nothing survives to support it. This is the , the together with the late- successor who carried the name on after him, and the published commentary is careful to hold both apart from the early- Ōei , Saemon-no-jō and Shikibu-no-jō, who came later.
His hand is most surely read in the carving. The school's , a devotional program of , , and , banner-and-halberd reliefs, and the invocation "Namu " cut into the blade, recurs across the corpus and is the hereditary specialty the published sources single out, calling it work "of a hereditary art, executed with notable skill". It appears on roughly half his surviving blades, against the plain of the rest, and on the finest pieces a long flame-framed and a on a lotus pedestal are layered together in . Few smiths of his time are so consistently identified by what they carved.
The steel beneath carries the descent plainly. Over an that stands and flows toward , the takes a thick with entering frequently, and on the finer-forged blades a pale, streak-like stands in the . The published sources read the thickly laid and frequent as the visible influence of the tradition, the trace of the study under Sadamune. The is laid in whatever its pattern, with and running through it, the bright, and the most often with , or running straight into a .
The published sources divide his work into three manners, and the division is the key to the smith. The first is "a showing the Kyō tradition," the refined straight temper of with fine and a faint , carried on the , and ; a dated piece they call an elegant work that "faithfully inherited the manner of the antecedents". The second is "a temper that inherits the Sadamune manner" (京物の伝統を示した直刃と貞宗風を受け継いだ, the two modes named together), a mixed with , well laid in with conspicuous , the most frequently met of his styles. The third belongs to the successor generation, which first produces and adds, beyond the two inherited modes, a lively -based . Its tell is named again and again: pairs of set side by side and "linked across the valleys by a low, small ", taking on a , arrow-notch, profile. On the most animated late blades , , and enter as well.
What sets him apart is held within his own work rather than borrowed from a comparison. The -derived keeps him in the Kyō tradition; the -rich , thick with , marks the Sadamune study; and the paired- of the late hand is the feature by which the daigawari is recognized. The published sources distinguish that late mode from the Ōei who follow, noting that in the late- hand the disorder is "broken down in a more cursive manner than in the Ōei ," a point used to keep the generations separate. They are equally candid that the name was shared: "there appear to have been several smiths of the signature in the period", and a Meitoku-3 signed Genzaemon-no-jō is by a different hand than the two-character of the year.
For the collector he is a name encountered with patience rather than at will. He has no National Treasures and no Important Cultural Properties on record; his standing rests instead on two and twenty-nine blades, thirty-one in the and tiers together, with a prewar Jūyō Bijutsuhin among them and Kōchū attached to several. Signed, dated, of the are uncommon, since the 's signed work is confined to and , so the dated late- and are prized above all as reference material. Of recorded whereabouts, his blades are held in long-standing collections and institutions, one of the preserved in the Samurai Art Museum in Berlin, with documented provenance to the Hisamatsu Matsudaira family, the Ōta collection and, in one instance, the Imperial Family. None of these is locked away as designated patrimony, so a signed example does, from time to time, pass into private hands; it comes to the serious collector only seldom, and a dated, carved by the is a landmark when it does.