SURF INSTRUCTOR: I'm senior instructor for Surfing Byron Bay. They're affiliated with Surfing Australia. They have surf schools throughout Australia. Kohai originally was a keen surfer in Japan and realised there was a market for surf coaching in Japan, and off that, realised that Australia is the leading country for surf-coaching development. So he's come straight to the source, through Surfing Australia, to develop those skills, so that he can take it back to Japan and start his own business, basically.

KOHAI: I have a family, and I left my wife and kids in Japan. I come here to train how to teach surfing.

SURF INSTRUCTOR: The industry has definitely professionalised itself over the last 10 years where, in the beginning, if you had interest in surfing and a basic Bronze Medallion, being with the Surf Life Saving Association, you could coach. Since then, it's become a lot more professionalised to the point where we have to have Advanced Resus, Advanced Medical Certificates. We have to be completely updated with the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia. We have updates continually. So there is... Yeah, there's a lot of training and retraining to be at this point - the point where I'm at at the moment.

Where the rock is, down the far end... Between the rock and here, you've got a fairly consistent pattern of whitewater through that whole cove area, yeah?

We take them to the beach, give them the right equipment, the right learning equipment, take them through the basics. In a way, I'm not really here to teach people to surf. I'm here to teach people how to surf, give them, though, that introduction and then out of that, say, eight people, you might have two or three who want to take it further. At that point, then we develop it up to wherever they want to go and then, at some point, it's hands off - they are out there and creating a hobby or a sport out of it.

Obviously, to be a complete professional surfer, you'd have to start very young and you need training and development right through. So a lot of these people, it's a leisure activity. Kohai spent two months in Byron Bay and during that time, I mentored him with developing his coaching skills. So on a day-to-day basis, Kohai would come out with me onto the beach and, at first, observed the process of developing... of surf coaching and then, after a while, I started to introduce him into more hands-on roles where, towards the end of the stay, he was pretty much running lessons himself, or I was giving him clients and a responsibility to take those clients through to where they wanted to be, and helping in the day-to-day running of the business as well, developing his English. It was just seeing how we worked, what pace we worked at, what the lifestyle factor was, and being able to take those things back home with him and introduce those into his own culture.

What we get out of it is on a business level, we have opened up markets with Japan. So people like...for example, I have a young guy, Nobi, this week. He's come especially from Tokyo to learn to surf in Byron Bay for five days. So that market's been opened up to us. We're not only focused on the domestic market but international trade as well. It's given me a better understanding of, say, the Japanese people, for example. When a lot of Australian people see busloads of older Japanese tourists with cameras - and that is the image that they have... It's given me a chance to see the youth of Japan. The youth of Japan is not so different from the youth of Australia. And we all want the same things - to have fun - and if surfing's a medium for that, then so be it.