The Japanese electronics company acknowledged Monday that it apologized to a customer for using Dec. 7 - the date of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor - as an example in an owners manual explaining how to set the date on its videocassette recorders.
Sony's apology came in response to a complaint by Scott L. Edelheit of Boca Raton, Fla., who said his father was killed at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
The date was inadvertently used in the Japanese-printed manual for a VCR Edelheit had bought, said Jason Farrow, a spokesman at Sony's U.S. headquarters in Park Ridge.
"We try to be sensitive on these issues," he said. "It would be irrational for anyone to think that a company that does 25 percent of its business in the United States would ever intentionally do anything like that."