Okay, and so let me tell you how this actually works, in terms of the law. PlayStation headquarters is in California. It is registered with the American government, its headquarters has land on American soil. That means it pays taxes to the U.S government, and pays its employees in terms of American currency, among other things. Legally-speaking, it is an American entity, regardless of cultural roots.
You are simply speaking idealistically here, not logically or objectively.
Okay but again, the main PlayStation headquarters is now within California. This isn't a sub-division regional branch like the old Sony of America used to be. The main branch for PlayStation is now in California.
I'll tell you how this actually works: I did work for many years in a gamedev studio of a major game publisher located in another country with many offices around the world. Each studio and each major division is oficially a 'separate' company from each country where the office is located, but all these companies are bought/part of the global corporation. In our case, our studio owners were partly ous studio bosses partly the company of that division, which is fully owned by the corporation. I was in a middle management position in daily contact with the HQ of our division and our corporation plus teams from many other studios spread around the world.
So we paid our taxes in our country for stuff we had to, specially those related to the workers of our studio, the office, etc. We paid the company of our division or the corportation for services from other studios of the corporation like testing, localization, QA, PR and so on. The company of our division paid us the budget for the games and the corporation paid us the budget of the game plus revenue share of the money generated by our games in exchange for 'giving' them the game. They do the same with the corporation.
The corportation is the one who sells the games to the custormers worldwide, pay the taxes of these games where needed (meaning the biggest amount of the taxes made by the games of our studio -or our studio- are paid by the corporation in another country with better tax system).
So yes, our studio was a 'different company' that paid the legally required taxes on its country, same goes with the company of our division and same goes with the global corporation. But at the end of the day the companies of our studio and our division where owned by the company of the global corportation, who pays the big chunk of the taxes (hundreds of millions every year) where needed.
Regarding decisions, we had some agency but obviously had to follow the mandate and plans of our owners, the corporation and the division. And same goes with the division, has some agency but has to follow the mandate of their owners, the corporation. Specially in top stuff like global corporation strategy and acquisitions the corporation, who is the real owner, is the one who decides what to do. Meaning the guys at SIE HQ (SIE is not PlayStation btw, one is a company/team and the other one is a brand) office aren't able to decide if Sony sells PlayStation to Disney, Sony should ask Sony Japan instead. And same goes with Sony Pictures.
"Protect" does not inherently mean prevention of them being purchased from a foreign corporation, though.
It for example depends on what type of field the company is in. The field, and the size of the company in terms of its contribution to the Japanese economy weigh at different scales but weight doesn't have to be equal in all areas for the company to be deemed important enough to prevent an acquisition from a foreign corporation.
Sony and Nintendo (moreso Sony, but that's just because they have active participation in other areas outside of video games) fall into that status, but companies like Koei-Tecmo, Capcom or Square-Enix would not. I hope that is understandable.
In this case what the Japanese goverment makes it's to forbid top companies in many strategic areas (in this case tech companies) from being acquired by foreign companies or countries.
Sony is a fucking giant Japanese company that generates $81.38B in revenue, has $238B in assets and 111,700 employees etc. So the government won't let it go. Obviously they don't care if some foreigner company buys small studios like Tango or Vanillaware.
I mean at this point, you're just agreeing with what I basically said, it just seems like you had to vehemently disagree with my point on PlayStation as a corporate entity being an American corporation now. And I don't know why you felt the need to do that, because in the legal sense (which is the one that matters here), your objection is inaccurate.
PlayStation is a brand, not a corporation, that belongs to the Japanese corporation Sony. You mean SIE (Sony Interactive Entertainment), who also belongs to Sony and has an HQ in California and another in Tokyo.
Regarding SIE, from wikipedia: Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), formerly known as Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), is a multinational video game and digital entertainment company wholly owned by Japanese multinational conglomerate Sony Group Corporation.
The SIE Group is made up of two legal corporate entities: Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC (SIE LLC) based in San Mateo, California, United States, and Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc. (SIE Inc.), based in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Tokyo-based SIE Inc. was originally founded as Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI or SCE) in November 1993 to handle Sony's venture into video game development for the PlayStation systems. SIE LLC was established in San Mateo in April 2016, and is managed through Sony's American branch, Sony Corporation of America.
So as I explained before yes, they have a company for SIE in America (and another in Japan), another for Sony of America, other ones for Naughty Dog, Bend, Sony Pictures and many other ones. But all of them are fully owned to Sony directly or -what is the same- via subsidiaries/divisions of Sony. Which is Japanese.
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