One result of the recent completion of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was to empower a new global body, the World Trade Organization (WTO), to enforce trade rules. Translating this general grant into particular policies raises complex issues regarding the harmonization of proscribed and transparent rules. On one level the problem involves the nation state's sovereignty: to what degree WTO policies would overrule a country's laws and constitution. At another level the problem is one of the substantive content of the policies themselves and how to design regulatory institutions aimed at bringing compliance. A related yet distinct dimension of these problems concerns the degree to which a nation's cultural and institutional distinctiveness impedes or fosters harmonization. This project seeks to study how harmonization in the antitrust field may be facilitated with reference to Japan; it compares Japanese antitrust development to the evolution of antitrust in the United States, Europe and Australia.