Power, the dinner table, and the cold sea
If a fisherman working for Songhak Fisheries dies on a boat on the icy winter waters of the Yellow Sea, the boat does not return to port. The fish are more important.
That is because whatever the boat catches is destined for the Central Committee’s dinner table.
When we hear the name Songhak Fisheries, we might imagine an ordinary seafood company. Most, of course, will have never heard the name at all. But behind it lies another name—“Unit 8.”
This mysterious organization is the one that runs the supply system under the direct control of the Central Committee of the ruling Korea Workers Party.
It handles the special distribution network responsible for the dining tables of the top leadership and core officials. Completely separated from the general distribution system, it reveals with absolute clarity what the regime prioritizes.
Unit 8 is a symbol of privilege. At the same time, it is a name that exposes how lightly human life can be treated.
Its main task is the production of specialty goods—premium ingredients harvested from the sea. The menu is long: pufferfish, rockfish, gizzard shad, butterfish, webfoot octopus, oysters, seaweed. This list goes on.
But these specialties are not mere products. They are items for the tables of the few which someone must risk their life to provide.
That is because whether workers assigned to Unit 8 set sail or not has nothing to do with the condition of the sea. Even when the waves are high and there’s a risk the boat may capsize, if a production order comes down, they must go out.
“We know we shouldn’t go out on days like that. But we still go. The plan comes first,” a man who once worked for the unit out of Haeju, South Hwanghae Province, told me.
Even when their hands go numb from the winter sea and lose all feeling, the work does not stop. If it were to, they would be branded as having “failed to meet the plan,” and suffered the consequences.
After COVID-19 spread in 2020 and the country sealed its borders and coastline, movement and distribution of goods between people were strictly controlled, and violations were punished. Authorities claimed these were “unavoidable measures to protect the state.”
But there was an exception to the lockdown. That was Unit 8.
Ordinary citizens were forbidden to move about, yet production and distribution for the Central Party officials’ dining tables never stopped. What took precedence over quarantine was not public safety, but the needs of those in power.
The seafood was the same, but its significance depended on whose mouth it entered. For citizens, it was a potential threat. For Central Party officials, it was a harmless delicacy.
This was not simply a matter of quarantine policy. It was a snapshot of how power operates. More frightening than the virus was discrimination, and more powerful than science was authority.
In this reality, frustration and doubt accumulated among the people. But voicing them was not easy.
In North Korean society, a single careless word does not end with the individual. In a system where family, relatives, and even neighbors can be implicated, silence becomes a condition for survival.
As a result, the Unit 8 system grew even more entrenched, and the sacrifices of workers beneath it became routine. The danger belonged to individuals. The benefits belonged to power.
We easily forget names made of numbers. But Unit 8 must be remembered. Even now, at this very moment, someone is disappearing into the cold waters so that someone else’s dinner table may be filled.
Daenam’s journey began in North Korea, where he was employed at a state-run company serving the nation’s elite. Seeking freedom, he defected and now continues his life as a college student, building a new future.
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