All over the world, most people are uninterested in what happens outside their own countries - and the Taiwanese are more uninterested than most. Events in Japan, however, have a way of catching people's attention here.
So it has not been too surprising that, since Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's landslide victory on September 11, you have not been able to turn on the television without some pundit telling you how it affects Taiwan. This is partly because Taiwan has its own charismatic Koizumi-like figure in Kuomintang chairman Ma Ying-jeou. Mr Ma, like Mr Koizumi, is known for his good looks and efforts at party reform.
The United States is enormously important to how Taiwan relates to the outside world, but it is Japan that matters inside Taiwan. Sixty years since the end of its colonial rule, Japan - not America - is still the cosmopolitan centre of global culture to which Taiwan aspires.
Taiwan's troubled high-speed rail project is a prominent example of Japan's importance to this island. When Japan built its bullet train in the 1960s, it symbolised that country's post-war recovery and re-entry into the modern world. For older Taiwanese like former president Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan's bullet train is immensely symbolic in that it shows the Japanese - in their own terms - that Taiwan is fully modernised. Mr Lee and his wife reportedly speak Japanese at home, as do many educated Taiwanese of their generation.
Smaller, less dramatic, examples of Japan's importance abound. The staff at a property agency near my house gathers every morning on the pavement to do calisthenics and shout slogans - team-building practices imported from Japan. The Japanese influence is felt particularly in food and drink. Japanese cuisine - especially sashimi and Japanese-style hot pots - is universal.
Young people queue up every evening at the Red Dragonfly in the trendy Yongkang Street area for Japanese-style kebabs. Taiwan is justly famous for its high-quality teas, but a recent advert for an iced green-tea drink showed a Taiwanese girl in Japan being praised by a tea master for serving him the advertised tea.