Akeno’s military history begins on 22 April 1920, when the Imperial Army opened a gunnery section of its aviation school on the plain near Ise. It became a branch school in 1921 and, on 24 May 1924, the independent Akeno Army Flying School, whose job was to teach the army’s fighter pilots. The following year the army’s air arm became the Army Air Corps, a branch equal to the infantry and artillery.

Through the 1930s and the war in China, Akeno trained the men who flew the army’s fighters; by 1941, Wikipedia says, the army’s air arm had about 1,500 combat aircraft. In June 1944, as the war turned against Japan, the school was reorganised as the Akeno Flight Training Division. The school’s wartime record and its graduates’ part in the special-attack campaign of 1945 are not detailed in the sources reached and are left out rather than guessed.

Japanese military flying resumed in 1952. The aviation school of the National Safety Force opened in 1952 at Hamamatsu, which had been the Imperial Army’s primary flight school from 1933 and was returned to Japan that year. On 1 July 1954, when the Self-Defense Forces were created, it became the GSDF Aviation School, sharing Hamamatsu with the new Air Self-Defense Force.

Between 15 July and 30 August 1955 the GSDF school moved to Akeno, and Camp Akeno opened on 1 August 1955. The school grew branches: one at Kasumigaura for maintenance and communications training, and one at Kita-Utsunomiya from 1973 for flying instruction. On 18 January 1962 the 10th Flight Squadron moved in from Yao, and on 27 March 2001 the Flight Experimental Squadron was reconstituted here.

English Wikipedia lists almost every GSDF helicopter type at Akeno: Bell AH-1S Cobras, Bell UH-1Js, Kawasaki OH-1 and OH-6D scouts, CH-47J/JA Chinooks, UH-60s and Enstrom TH-480 trainers. That mix reflects the school’s job: basic rotary-wing training on light helicopters, then conversion to the types pilots will fly in their units.

The AH-1S is the heart of Akeno’s fighting role. Fuji built 89 under licence between 1984 and 2000, and the camp houses the 5th Anti-Tank Helicopter Squadron, one of five formed between 1986 and 1992 and renamed combat helicopter squadrons in 2021. The school’s Akeno Rainbow team displays the OH-6D and the AH-1S at open days.

At 31 March 2024 the GSDF held 292 helicopters: 40 anti-tank, 12 combat, 49 transport, 37 observation and 154 utility, plus 14 tiltrotors and eight fixed-wing aircraft, according to Japanese Wikipedia’s summary of the official figures. Almost all of them are Japanese-built versions of American designs, and their crews start at Akeno.

The licence-building tradition runs deep. Kawasaki built 387 OH-6 and Hughes 369 helicopters for Japanese users, the OH-6J and OH-6D among them. Fuji built 130 UH-1Js from 1993, Kawasaki assembled the CH-47J from kits delivered from September 1985, and the GSDF had 40 Mitsubishi-built UH-60JAs in March 2022. The next generation follows the same pattern: the UH-2 replacing the UH-1J is a Bell 412 built by Subaru.

The Defense Buildup Program adopted in December 2022 decided that the functions of anti-tank, combat and observation helicopters would be transferred to drones, and that most division and brigade aviation units would be abolished, with the remaining helicopters concentrated in the regional armies. Wikipedia reports that 47 AH-1S and 33 OH-1 are to be replaced.

For Akeno that means the types it has trained attack and scout crews on since the 1980s are on their way out. The Ministry of Defense documents reached do not give a retirement date or say what the school will teach instead; the FY2025 and FY2026 budgets put the aviation money into UH-2 utility helicopters rather than new attack types.