Old U.S. base site in Subic now a bustling town

Korea, Japan can learn from lessons of Subic Bay

By Lee Sun-hyeok - The Hankyoreh

SUBIC BAY, The Philippines - Well-paved asphalt roads and a one-story building with a dome - a leftover trace of the barracks that were once housed here - are the only things that differentiate Subic Bay from other towns of its size in the Philippines. About a two-hour drive north of Manila, Subic Bay was once the site of a huge U.S. military base.


I visited Subic on December 22 with members of the Korea Green Foundation and the Peace Boat, a Japan-based international nongovernmental organization, and found that the city was still using the infrastructure built by the U.S. troops stationed there for almost 90 years. About 300 Koreans and Japanese participated in this year’s 15-day event held by those two organizations, titled the Peace and Green Boat. Participants boarded a ship in Fukuoka, Japan, and sailed to Hong Kong, Vietnam, and The Philippines. In each city they visited, they held a meeting with the residents there about peace and helping the environment.


The former U.S. base of Subic Bay was built on 230 square kilometers of land, making it nearly 80 times the size of Seoul’s Yongsan Garrison. But today, 16 years after the base was returned to the Philippines, Subic is not a deteriorated military base but a bustling city with a feeling of renewal. The streets where the U.S. soldiers used to walk are now full of local people. On the former base’s runways, military aircraft have been replaced with civilian jetliners carrying passengers in and out of the region. The residents trying to sell me souvenirs addressed me in an amalgam of Japanese and Korean.


During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military hired more than 40,000 locals to work on the base; in 2003, most people have found employment in the city itself. Hundreds of foreign companies have moved into Subic, and worldwide shipping firm FedEx uses an airport at the former base as its logistics hub for East Asia. A large shopping mall was built in Olongpao, a district where about 6,000 prostitutes used to live. When the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit was held in Subic in 1995, the entire city was designated as a free trade zone. The Mt. Pinatubo eruption in June 1991 seriously damaged the city, but Subic has recovered, and is still popular as a tourist destination, with its beautiful natural scenery and resort facilities.

However, deep wounds from the U.S. military presence remain in the lives of residents here. One 56-year-old man, who managed an arsenal at the base for 20 years, said he now has health problems involving his liver and kidneys due to prolonged exposure to asbestos at work. One of his sons died in infancy with no cause found, and two other sons were stricken with polio. According to him, more than one family member of most people who worked at the base suffered from similar such diseases. Myrla Baldonado, secretary-general of the Philippine People’s Task Force on Base Clean-up, said, "Three or four persons out of the 40,000 or so that worked at the U.S. base die of diseases such as leukemia every month."


The United States has not admitted its responsibility for such situations, saying that there were no environmental agreements made when it returned the base to the Philippines. As a standing reminder of this, two thousand U.S. military-made concrete bunkers contaminated by chemicals have been abandoned in the forests near Subic.


"When I visited Subic in 1994, four year after the return of the base, the city looked like a ghost town," said Tetsuo Maeda, 68, a professor of Okinawa University. He praised the city for successfully transforming back into a normal metropolitan area. He wants the Japanese and Korean governments to learn from the case of Subic, as both nations have been working to clean up former U.S. bases that pose serious environmental pollution problems.