On October 30, 1929, several Japanese middle school students commuting from Gwangju harassed three female students from Gwangju Girls' High School — Park Gi-ok, Lee Gwang-chun, and Lee Geum-ja — by grabbing and pulling their traditional braided hair (danggimmeori) as they got off a train at Naju Station. Park Jun-chae, Park Gi-ok's cousin, witnessed the harassment and confronted the Japanese students in protest, but they ignored him. The confrontation escalated into a physical fight, which grew into a larger brawl involving roughly 50 Japanese students against 30 Korean students. Though outnumbered, the Korean students reportedly had the upper hand in morale and fighting spirit.
The decisive factor was how the Japanese police responded when they arrived on the scene: rather than acting as neutral mediators, they sided openly with the Japanese students. This blatant discrimination triggered a collective protest by students at Gwangju High School, and that movement erupted into full-scale anti-Japanese demonstrations in Gwangju on November 3 of that same year. This marked the beginning of the Gwangju Student Independence Movement (also known as the Gwangju Student Anti-Japanese Movement). The movement spread nationwide through 1930, and is widely regarded as the largest mass anti-Japanese resistance movement in Korean history after the March 1st Movement of 1919. The fact that a seemingly minor scuffle at a train station ultimately became the spark that shook colonial Korea to its core illustrates how accumulated, everyday discrimination in a society can erupt into something far larger when the right trigger arrives.