Japan's Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said Friday that joint training drills between Japan and the United States using the MV-22 Osprey aircraft, will be expanded to Shiga and Koichi prefectures in western Japan in October.

The move comes as the government is trying to ease the base hosting burdens of Okinawa and its people who shoulder the bulk of US bases in Japan.

Onodera said he will try to seek the approval of local officials in the two western prefectures for the training drills, which will be the first of their kind held outside Okinawa.

The defense ministry said that the drills in Shiga Prefecture, planned for mid-October, will involve joint "heliborne" operations between Japan and the US, during which troops will descend from the aircraft to the ground using ropes, while the aircraft is hovering.

The drills will utilize the ability of the MV-22 Osprey, which can take off and hover like a helicopter, but fly like a fix- winged plane.

In Koichi Prefecture the drills will involve the Osprey responding to mock-disaster situations in preparation for a massive earthquake predicted by seismologists to occur in the future along the Nankai Trough, off central and western Japan, the ministry said.

The planned drills will likely be met with staunch resistance from local prefectural officials and citizens in both prefectures who are concerned about the plane's checkered safety record.

The latest incident involving the accident-prone plane occurred in Nevada on Aug. 26 and saw four crew members escaped injury when a Marine Corps' Osprey made what investigators called a "hard landing" near the Creech Air Force Base.

The plane's safety was also called into question in April 2012 when an Osprey crashed in Morocco and killed two Marines. Another crash in Florida in June 2012, which injured all five crew members, did little to improve faith in the plane, which costs more than 100 million US dollars.

During the plane's developmental phase 30 Marines died in three crashes, including 19 in a single accident in Arizona, in 2000, according to official US military aviation sources.

Adding to the plane's dubious safety record, in 2010 an Air Force CV-22 touched down short of its landing zone in Afghanistan, hit a ditch, and flipped over, killing four Marines.