Practicing 'Infantile Capitalism'.

WHAT peculiar practices are Sony Corp., among the worldliest of Japan's big exporters, sending to American shores by way of its film division, Sony Pictures Entertainment? It's a fair question considering the recent record of Columbia Pictures, Sony's prized Hollywood studio -- though perhaps not for the reasons some may think.

First came the revelation a few weeks ago, via a diligent Newsweek reporter, that one "David Manning," whose critical praise of four Columbia films ran in numerous newspaper ads, was imaginary -- a fictional film critic conjured by two execs in the studio's (appropriately named) creative advertising department.

Virtual Manning purportedly wrote for The Ridgefield Press, a real, live, ink-on-paper weekly in Connecticut -- not an organ noted for its aesthetic acumen, but one adding a hometown touch to all those blaring blurbs from die big-city dailies.

Now comes the news that two Sony employees -- again from that highly creative ad crowd -- posed as ordinary moviegoers in television spots promoting other Columbia releases. "A perfect date movie," an office assistant apparently burbles in reference to "The Patriot," a Mel Gibson vehicle that came out last year.

I've seen neither the ad nor the film, but then I haven't had a perfect date in I don't know how long.

Two-way street

Shabby. But any notion that false advertising is somehow a Japanese invention would carry a strong whiff of yellow-peril paranoia -- those sneaky Japanese. If I had a French franc for every shuck American companies have put over on the world's consumers, the dateline on this column would be somewhere along the Cote d'Azur.

Broadly defined, trans-Pacific corporate chicanery is no novelty, either. It stretches back at least as far as the Lockheed affair of the mid-1970s, in which the late Kakuei Tanaka, fabled kingmaker in the Liberal Democratic Party before and afterwards, accepted millions from the U.S. aircraft manufacturer while it negotiated favorable contracts -- a joint venture if ever there was one.

No, the latest from Sony is interesting not as scandal -- there's nothing new in it as such. It's interesting because it reveals the extent to which Japanese companies are prepared to export what astute scholars on both sides of the Pacific identify as a phenomenon peculiar to present-day Japan. They call, it "infantile capitalism."

I'm not sure I would exempt the U.S. from this description. The running battle Americans fight over Hollywood may be about many things, but one of them, surely, is the film industry's dedicated effort to turn Americans into easy-to-please children.

But the deep-thinkers have a point about Japan. This is a nation, after all, in which otherwise serious adults consume bizarre psychosocial, psychosexual, psycho-everything comics by the millions -- the famous manga, some the size of telephone books. It is a nation where instead of visiting Rome, Russia, or the canals of Amsterdam, you visit a theme park modeled on the locale and culture of your choice.

I recall contemplating this once on a beach south of Tokyo -- an indoor beach, of course, with artificial waves. The virtual becomes not merely a substitute for the actual -- it is understood as an improvement. The spectacle of life is better than living. It's a cast of mind rooted in protection, one must finally conclude -- in a society that is at once protected from others and protecting of its members.

Games or critics?

In industry, infantile capitalism is reflected in a hundred varieties of "virtual reality" products and in a childlike obsession with machines and pointless gadgets -- and Japan overflows with both, of course.

Sony will soon bless American audiences with "Stuart Little 2," a sequel based on the book (without the numeral) by E.B. White. In the film, the title character is an animated image cavorting among real actors. A love story between a mouse and a bird, the director informed a newspaper interviewer recently. White must be spinning in his grave.

The question becomes obvious. How far is it from video games and computer-generated film actors to phony film critics and virtually real testimonials from Sony employees standing outside a local movie theater? Not far, it would seem: about the distance from the animation room to the advertising department, and the door between them is apparently ever open.

It is no good criticizing this company for engaging in practices that appear to be something other than foreign to its industry -- and others. In this case, the issue is not whether Sony broke a rule, unwritten or not. It is whether Sony execs understood that there are lines best not crossed. This is not the first time a Japanese company's conduct has raised such a question. And as Japan goes global, it almost certainly won't be the last.

Patrick Smith is a former correspondent in Asia and the author of "Japan: A Reinterpretation."