Yamaura Kiyomaro was born Naizosuke Tamaki in Bunka 10 (1813) at Akaiwa village in Komoro, Shinshu, the second son of the rural warrior Nobukaze and the younger brother of the smith Saneo. He learned forging first under Kawamura Toshitaka, a swordsmith of the Ueda domain, signing his early blades Masayuki and for a brief interval Hidetoshi, the name his teacher had given him, before returning to Masayuki within the year. In Tenpo 6 (1835) he went up to Edo under the patronage of the bakufu retainer and military scholar Kubota Kiyone, forged for a year at Choshu Hagi, returned to Edo, and in the autumn of Koka 3 (1846) settled at Iga-cho in Yotsuya and changed his signature to Kiyomaro. He so excelled in the Soshu tradition that the published sources record he was called the Yotsuya Masamune (四谷正宗), and they place his reputation today as high as that of Kotetsu, calling him without question the foremost master among the shinshinto. He died by his own hand at forty-two in Kaei 7 (1854).
What he aimed at, in the words of the published commentary, was the upper level of the Soshu transmission, his being the hand in which 「相伝上位」 is most fully reached, and among shinshinto smiths his construction and manner reveal Soshu-den with particular clarity. The temper is the tell. Over the jigane he lays a gunome-midare mixed with ko-notare, the ashi entering, the nie thick and gathering coarse in clusters of ara-nie, the whole work, as the NBTHK puts it, 「覇気に満ちている」[[c:1]], filled with a vigorous and commanding spirit. Long kinsuji and streaming sunagashi run through nearly every blade he signed, in both his Masayuki and his Kiyomaro periods, the conspicuous activity of a ha built on nie rather than on nioi clusters; the published sources single out this play of kinsuji and sunagashi in his strong steel as splendid. The boshi answers the edge, midare-komi turning pointed with hakikake, at times thrusting up to a point or settling into a small round.
The jigane is the constant beneath all of this. He forges an itame that flows and stands a little, well packed and at times mixed with large open grain, the ji-nie laid thick and in fine particles, the chikei entering frequently and the steel clear. There is no utsuri; this is a late hand reaching back over five centuries to Soshu, not a Bizen revival, and the brightness lives instead in the depth of the nie and the clarity of the nioiguchi. Where the forging tightens into ko-itame the jigane only grows clearer, and his mature katana carry an imposing shape, the body wide, the sori toward the point, the chu-kissaki extended or running to a large point with the fukura withered for a sharp impression.
His work is read across two periods and two registers. The earlier Masayuki blades, signed Masayuki, Minamoto Masayuki, Yamaura Tamaki Masayuki, and the bare single character Tamaki, show a tighter itame tending to masame, a gunome mixed with choji, deep nioi and well-attaching ko-nie, the open document of his early Edo years and his wandering through Choshu and Komoro. The mature Kiyomaro manner is the Soshu prime described above. Within it lies the register he prized most, the Shizu manner: the published sources call 「志津伝は得意中の得意」[[c:2]], the Shizu transmission his forte of fortes, naming one katana a Shizu-utsushi that shows variation in both ji and ha and stands among his representative works. That register gathers in the shobu-zukuri and kanmuri-otoshi-zukuri wakizashi he favoured and in the tanto, where a ko-notare base mixed with gunome and choji tempers, with ara-nie in clusters, into a brilliantly flamboyant midare.
What sets Kiyomaro apart from his shinshinto contemporaries is exactly this Soshu reach. Where his peers copied Bizen choji or the dense steel of Kotetsu, he looked to Shizu Saburo Kaneuji and the Soshu masters, and the published commentary reads his aim as Shizu even in the early Masayuki hand. His own steel and edge, thick in ji-nie and chikei, vigorous in ara-nie, profuse in kinsuji and sunagashi, set him apart by their force and brightness rather than by any borrowed Bizen pattern; the judges call one of his finest blades 「同作中の白眉」, the very best among works by the same hand, and say of another that 「清麿の本領が遺憾無く発揮」[[c:3]], that his true ability is there fully revealed. He stands at the head of the Yotsuya line, the Soshu-revival manner carried forward through his pupil Kiyondo and the wider Kiyomaro-den.
For the collector Kiyomaro is among the most sought of all the late smiths, and his record bears it out. Fujishiro grades him Sai-jo saku, and the Toko Taikan values his work high among shinshinto names. He has no National Treasures and no Important Cultural Properties; his standing rests instead on the modern designation tiers, with two blades at Tokubetsu Juyo, some forty-six at Juyo, and a further handful at the prewar Juyo Bijutsuhin. Extant works likely number a little over one hundred, and the published sources note that examples in ordinary shinogi-zukuri with standard dimensions are comparatively few, and that a matched daisho dated Kaei 1 is without parallel. The recorded blades pass through documented hands: the Iwasaki family and the Seikado Bunko that holds their collection, a retainer of the Matsushiro domain who commissioned a daisho, the patron Kubota Kiyone for whom one Kiyomaro forged a katana, and the Bakumatsu swordsman Chujo Kinnosuke, whose favored sword one Juyo katana is said to have been. Most are held rather than traded, and a Tokubetsu Juyo or Juyo Kiyomaro reaches the market only from time to time and at the very top of it; a signed example in private hands is among the more notable things a collector of shinshinto could hope to encounter, a document of the moment when Soshu was reborn in Edo.
