Duty, as a concept and an ethos, is somewhat unfashionable nowadays. Freedom, particularly the personal and individualistic kind of freedom, is the virtue most often held in highest regard. It is the kind of freedom that permits you to go where you wish, leave responsibilities behind, forge your own personal soul beyond the bounds of any sort of community, with its demands and expectations. In the streaming series Shogun, Blackthorne is an example of this. He leaves a wife and child behind in England to set sail on the high seas, off to find his fortune and himself. Yet he only achieves genuine self-knowledge as he becomes more and more enmeshed in Toronaga’s court, eventually receiving the rank of hatamoto, a kind of lieutenant in the samurai hierarchy. Even then, he still bristles against being told what to do…

A drama set in seventeenth-century Japan explores the claims of duty on individual freedom.